The Dance
by daccu65
Summary: In 'Conversations With Mother', we saw a possible future for Ruby through the conversations she had at her mother's memorial. In 'Sisters Grow Up', Yang learned that Ruby and Jaune had gotten together. Now, let's learn about the future, from Jaune's point of view.
1. The First Dance

_Dear Potential Reader:_

 _Please note that the characters that appear in this tale are not mine; they belong to Rooster Teeth. This story is not intended to generate profit; it was merely written for the joy of writing and, hopefully, your joy in reading. This is a companion tale to my earlier stories, 'Sisters Grow Up' and 'Conversations with Mother'._

 _That said, please enjoy._

* * *

I know you've all had some bad things jump up and just hit you out of nowhere. It's called life, it happens to all of us. Have you ever had something good, the best thing that ever happened to you, just come out of nowhere?

Yes, no?

Have you ever had that wonderful thing show up and then stick around for years until you actually realized it was a wonderful thing?

No? Well, that's what happened to me. That's why I'm sitting in a hospital right now, with my left leg hurting, waiting to see some very special people. Are you a little confused, maybe interested? Well, let me tell you how I got here.

First of all, my name is Jaune Arc. My family is known for producing heroes; huntsmen who stand between the innocent and the creatures of darkness. You would think that as a youngster, I would have gotten the best training available, but you'd be wrong. My grandfather and father decided that we should take a generation off, so as a child I was absolutely forbidden from touching weapons. What started me on this path was one of my older sisters.

I was fifteen years old when we were visiting grandpa. The eight of us grand-kids had been planted in his spare rooms for the night. Well, one of my older sisters woke me and another of our sisters up and led us to the top of the stairs. Grandpa was sitting in his big chair, next to a fireplace while my parents and a couple of other adults sat around him. He had the sort of happy, sort of sad expression on his face and was telling about some place he called Anima. We were sitting in shadows, so the adults couldn't see us.

"What's happening?" I whispered to Cerise, my oldest sister.

"Grandpa's telling stories about his adventures," she whispered back to me and Ivoire, the second oldest. "They're the stories that he wont tell when we can hear him."

"So we shouldn't be here, listening?" Ivoire asked her.

"Exactly!" Cerise grinned.

Of course Ivoire and I grinned back. There's nothing like forbidden tales that will make teens go through anything to learn.

Come to think of it, maybe that would be the best way to teach school. Tell the kids that they are absolutely forbidden to learn history, math and science. Then, attempt to teach the lessons to empty classrooms and allow the kids to sneak in and covertly listen. Once you tell a kid that he can't have something, he'll go to any length to get it.

Okay, sorry. I'm getting off the topic. What I mean to say is that because grandpa, mom and dad didn't want us to hear the old man's stories, we were determined to hear as many as we could. Even through the years, I can still remember sitting there, in the chilly dark, while the old man spoke of his life as a huntsman. He didn't dwell on the foes he had killed, he told about the friends he had made, the hardships he had suffered and the people he had helped. Occasionally, dad would prompt him and he would admit that he had fought grimm and bandits, but he never went into details. I didn't realize it at the time, but he didn't like to talk about the grimm and the people that had fallen to his blade.

The other thing that sticks out in my memory is the other rough men and women who were a part of his stories. These tough people who had suffered so much were delighted that father had managed to keep my sisters and me out of the combat academies. They were clearly envious that grandpa now had eight grandchildren. I also remember them demanding, begging, and simply asking both father and grandpa to never let any of us take up that life. According to all of these old, rough people, they had suffered and sacrificed so we wouldn't have to.

When we returned home from our visit, I took to the town and school libraries a great deal more than usual, reading about my grandfather. It wasn't a quick and easy study. You see, the history files don't follow the exploits of individuals, they deal with the events, what led up to them and the consequences of them. I had to do searches on my grandfather's name, then read up on the events that he was involved in. All that study didn't go unnoticed. My parents figured out what I was doing.

Remember when I said that forbidden knowledge will drive a kid to learn? Well, my parents sat me down and told me that they had promised my grandfather that they wouldn't allow any of their children to become hunters. Then they did something that was incredibly foolish; they forbade me from looking into the family past.

If there was ever a way to fire a child's imagination and determination, that's it.

Okay, my parents regularly checked my scroll's browser history. I simply borrowed a friend's scroll to do my research. They made periodic checkups on what files I accessed at the school and city libraries. Again, I used a friend's identification. I learned that I came from a long line of huntsmen, dating back to the great war. While my father was a member of the city watch, he hadn't attended a huntsmans' academy...at my grandfather's request. While the old, hardened men of my grandfather's generation considered this a good thing, I was by now sixteen years old and knew better. My father had broken an old and honorable tradition.

It would be up to me to restore it.

If my grandfather hadn't passed away before I turned seventeen, I would have probably never managed to enter Beacon Academy. You see, he had gone to such great lengths to separate my father from the hunter's life that my father didn't even realize what it took to get into a huntsman's academy. Because I was determined to restore my family's honor, I researched the requirements, using my friend's identity, a great deal. I had already started to assemble fake credentials when the terrible news came that the old man had finally laid down his last burdens.

Of course, that only herded me more firmly towards my goal.

Take an awkward sixteen year old and have him attend his grandfather's funeral, where dozens of hard-bitten old men, draped with medals and other honors, speak his praises. Then, let him watch a small parade of various dignitaries speak, either live or via a remote transmission, of the cities, villages and even kingdoms he fought to protect. Finally, after the funeral is done and that boy is in his room, have the boy's father come in, hand him the legendary sword and shield that belonged to his grandfather. Have the boy's father say that the sword and shield are now his and if, sometime in the future, he manages to have two sons, one of them will be free to take up the huntsman's life.

If all of this happens to that sixteen year old, he will look at the honors piled on the deceased and think, 'that could be me'. He'll listen to the legacy and think, 'that's my obligation'. He'll take up that sword and shield and instead of thinking of a son, maybe a decade away, he'll think 'this is mine now'. I'm sure you know where I'm going with this. I used those false credentials and applied to Beacon. By some miracle or tragedy...I'm still not sure which...I was accepted. Had my grandfather still been alive, he would have realized that something was severely wrong but my parents didn't know about the entry standards. They simply told me that if I couldn't make it, it would be okay and I could return home.

Now seventeen and with those words of confidence to bolster me, I set out on the next step of my life. Looking back, I kind of wonder if my parents had realized just what I was getting myself into and hoped that my first taste of hunters' training would make me realize that I wanted no part of the life. That's actually a good plan; give the rebellious teen exactly what he wants. The only thing that they couldn't have predicted was more blessings coming my way; good friends and adversity.

The good friends came in the forms of Lie Ren, Nora Valkyrie, Ruby Rose and Pyrrha Nikos. The adversity came in the forms of Cardin Winchester and Cinder Fall. I won't bore you with all of the details of my life at Beacon. The only things I'll say are these: When a child prodigy so capable that she's accepted to a prestigious huntsman's academy two years early won't accept that you're a failure; you can't accept it yourself. When a couple of tough and resourceful teenagers, orphaned as children, stick together, pull through life and are accepted to that same academy accept you as their team leader and friend; you force yourself to become a leader and a friend. When a bullying jerk sets his sights on you and makes your life a living hell until you find the courage and strength to stand up to him and force him to treat you with respect; you can't help but respect yourself.

When a young woman, who is already a living legend for her fighting prowess _and_ turns out to be kindly, supportive and nurturing, turns that support towards making you a better person; you can't help but become a better person. Then, when a psychopathic bitch on a power grab murders that same, wonderful young woman, shortly after the wonderful young woman admits that she loves you; you look for answers. You look to find a way to make up for your failures and shortcomings. You look for revenge.

In short, you band up with your three friends and try to deny Cinder whatever it was that she killed Pyrrha to obtain.

By all that I hold sacred, by the dust of creation itself, we were naive, green idiots! Okay, Ren and Nora had been there and done that for years, so they kept us out of the worst trouble but we really didn't know what we were in for. We hiked out of the Kingdom of Vale, across the north of Sanus, took the first boat that would deliver us to Anima and trudged across the continent to Mistral. We traded our ability to fight for room, board, upkeep and a few lien. It took us months, it was a completely stupid thing to do, yet it was probably the best thing that we ever did.

Do you want to be _able_ to do a lot of sit-ups? The best way is to do a lot of sit-ups. Do you want to be _able_ to run for miles? Then get out and start running for miles. Do you want to become a capable huntsman? Then walk across two continents while fighting grimm and bandits. Force yourself to live off the land and off of your skills. Deal with people who need your services but don't have the money to pay you. Okay, Ruby's uncle was trailing us, keeping the worst of the grimm away from us, be we still faced more than our fair share of fighting and other hardships. By the time we reached Mistral, we were a solid team and while I was still the weakest of us four, I had narrowed the gap on the other three.

Instead of them having to protect me in a fight, I was the one that could do the least.

I know, that last one still sounds bad but it was an important step. When I started at Beacon, I couldn't handle a single Ursa. By the time we hiked out of Vale, I could handle myself against the most common grimm. By the time we reached Mistral, I could hold my own against most bandits, as well. Okay, an elite huntsman or huntress could hand all four of us our collective asses, but I was leagues beyond where I had been. This meant that my teammates didn't have to worry about me once steel, claws and fangs started flying through the air. Something else happened on that journey; Ren managed to put some personal demon to rest. It wasn't necessarily the blessing you would think it would be, at least not for Ruby and me...but more about that later.

Have you ever been through an attempt to violently overrun a kingdom? I don't mean a minor revolt where some folks want the powers-that-be to do things differently and are willing to block traffic and maybe even lynch some folks to get their way. I mean, have you ever been in a kingdom when some psychopathic bitch unleashes forces she's been marshaling for years, in an effort to kill every man, woman and child in the kingdom? No? Count yourself lucky. My friends and I have been through three, but it's the second one I'm talking about right now.

There were certain things that the Battle for Mistral had in common with the Battle for Vale. It consisted of mainly White Fang and grimm invading the kingdom from the outside while Salem's operatives sowed mistrust, anger and confusion within the kingdom. There were some differences; since Haven Academy isn't separated from Mistral City by a physical barrier, the struggle to save both Haven and Mistral merged into one, big fight. Another big difference was that Mistral happened to have a large under-class that resented their upper-class overlords and were subject to rising up to fight. I'll tip my hat to Salem, she convinced the White Fang that they would have a place in the sun when she was done with the kingdoms and she convinced some of the Mistral under-class that she would limit the slaughter to the upper-classes.

In the end, I think that the deciding factor was that Atlas hadn't sent in a mass of androids to provide security. Without them present for Salem's forces to subvert, the other side didn't have the massive firepower that they had in Vale. On the other hand, they didn't have Team RWBY stumbling onto one of the major component of their plans a couple of days ahead of time. It was a rough and chaotic fight and a lot of people died.

You never met Neptune Vasalias. If you ask people who knew me back in Beacon, they might say that we didn't like each other. That wasn't the case. You see, I had a foolish infatuation with this girl and she had the same infatuation with him and I didn't understand how he couldn't return her feelings. We had a talk and we were pretty good with each other by the end of it. Well, he and that girl didn't last more than a week but when she was in danger during the Battle for Mistral, he stepped in, saved her and paid with his life.

You also never met Sage Ayana. I'll admit that I never even spoke to him but I owe him. He helped behead a giant nevermore that was threatening Pyrrha, fought in the Battle of Beacon and saved a lot of lives during the Battle for Mistral. He paid the price, as well. I guess that's part of being an aging huntsman; missing old friends and wondering why you never got to know other acquaintances better.

In the end, Mistral and Haven survived. Airship transportation was limited to the rebuilding effort in Mistral City itself, so the four of us hiked to Windpath and caught a ship back to Vale. That trip wasn't eventful for the fighting, it was eventful because of Ren and Nora. You know that personal demon of Ren's I was talking about earlier? It turned out that when it was gone, he finally started to look at Nora as a young woman. She had been looking at him as a young man for some time, but now they were suddenly free to _really_ explore this new discovery.

Okay, they tried to be a little discrete about the whole thing but they had this little problem consisting of healthy teenagers' hormones, a major adrenaline rush and a several years of buildup. They managed to contain themselves the first two days out of Mistral, simply cuddling at night, but by day three they had had enough. Every evening for the rest of the week-long hike to the coast, they would excuse themselves from the camp, walk a respectful distance away, then proceed to have sex with all of the discretion of an avalanche hitting a bell factory.

Conversations with Ruby were more than a little awkward with that going on.

It didn't stop when we got on the ship. A long sea voyage can be boring; so guess how the two of them decided to pass the time? I've always been a little subject to motion sickness and I blame the two of them for contributing to it on the voyage back to Vale. Fine, try to tell me that no amount of motion from two people, massing about 160 kilos between them, is going to have any effect on the ship's stability. I lived through the motion and I can tell you that it did. I fed fish all across the northern passage and I was ready to kiss the dirty dock at Vale when we finally put in. Look, I'm not trying to act like I was mad at my friends; I was very happy that they had finally worked things out. Besides that, the grimm are attracted to negative emotions and the positive emotions the two of them were putting out probably had every dark creature running like hell. It's just that I was a healthy young man at the time and hearing and, at least on the ship feeling what they were doing played havoc on my nerves.

I didn't think of it at the time, but Ruby was a healthy young woman and it wasn't exactly easy on her, either.

Of course, once we were in Vale we were confronted with the issue of what to do with ourselves. We wanted to attend classes at Beacon, but we were late for the current semester and we had an awful lot of time before the next one started. We checked the mission boards and there was work to be had, so we decided that we'd help out by taking missions to sweep the area of Grimm. However, I had one thing to do first; I wanted to go home, let my parents know that I was fine and confess my actions. I'll admit that it was a convenient confession; I was now nineteen and had built a fledgling reputation as a huntsman, so I was capable of living on my own if my folks decided to throw me out. I didn't think they would; we're all way to close for that, but I had to admit to them that my career, if you will, was based on a lie I told them. To this day, I don't know how we came to the agreement that Ruby would come along with me.

If you ever want to find out just how much you've changed, visit home. I had only been gone for a little over a year and nothing about the house had changed...but I didn't fit in it like I was supposed to. I actually knocked on the door, rather than just walking in. My parents' eyes actually flew wide when they saw me. Both of my sisters, who were still living at home, also gave me the shocked look, although it didn't stop all of us from sharing a heartfelt series of hugs. The hallways and rooms seemed narrower and my father wasn't the large man I remembered. My sisters and mother had shrunk to petite women.

In short, I had grown up a great deal without realizing it.

I should have guessed what was going through my parents' minds when they asked me if it would be okay for Ruby to have one of my departed sisters' rooms while I had my old one. Okay, I was being an idiot; it was only a logical conclusion when your legally-an-adult son visits for a few days and brings a girl along with him. In our defense, we had been traveling together for so long that the idea of letting one of us go off on his or her own was as unthinkable as gnawing off our own arms. Teammates stick together. At the time, she was only seventeen and I'd punch anyone in the eye if they suggested that anything improper was happening between the two of us. We were teammates and close friends. We were still fixated on Cinder and completing our education. Add to this, I was still not over Pyrrha, so the thought of anything romantic didn't occur to us.

Looking back, it would have saved the two of us a fair amount of frustration if we'd have just noticed the knowing looks my parents kept giving us whenever the two of us interacted.

To make a long story short, we stayed with my folks for two days. The rest of my sisters lived fairly close to home and were able to come visit. Again, it was weird being treated as an adult and not as a kid brother. Ivoire was now married and Cerise was engaged, hammering home just how much could happen when you were on the road. By the time Ruby and I had to leave, Zwei had so thoroughly charmed my two remaining sisters that there was no question that we could leave him with my folks. I can remember that it was a bright, clear morning when Ruby and I left to catch the ferry back to Vale City.

I remember it because that was the day I realized that the house I had grown up in wasn't my home anymore.

But enough of that! We got back to Beacon and the staff tried to accommodate us and several other students who had arrived too late to attend formal classes. A lot of us took jobs sweeping the Emerald Forest, Forever Fall, and Beacon Academy itself of grimm. The dragon was still on the side of Beacon Tower and was drawing grimm to the school, so there was plenty of work. A boy named Oscar showed up with Ruby's uncle Qrow, and the staff let him take the position of headmaster. Oscar set up some evening classes for what he called the non-traditional students. Ruby, Nora, Ren and I rented some rooms at a hunters' hostel in town and attended classes part-time.

Let me say something about Qrow Branwen at this point; he isn't my favorite person to this day but I have to admit that he understood being a huntsman. He once told Ruby that each day on the road was worth a week in an academy and he was right. Several of the classes that had seemed so daunting to me back before Cinder made her move were now trivial. Qrow did something else; he suspected that there were spies around so he set a trap, suggesting that the Beacon Relic was to be found in the cellars under the tower. Sure enough, we caught the same jerk that had once bullied me down there, trying to find it.

Okay, now back to what I was saying about a day on the road being worth a week in class: Cardin Winchester had been attending classes, when they were available, ever since the Battle of Beacon. He was a tougher man when he was caught spying than when Beacon fell. On the other hand, I had been on the road almost the entire time and had fought the Battle of Mistral. I didn't realize it at the time, but the road had done a number on me. My team took care of the rest of his team, leaving me to face him by myself. I'll admit that he got a couple of shots in on me, but that was mainly because I didn't want to kill him...dead men tell no tales and all that. In the end, I had a couple of bruises and he was laying on the ground, aura depleted and several ribs broken. Look, I don't take any pride in inflicting pain on him...I take some joy in it, but no pride. The thing about that fight was that when we forced the rest of Team CRDL to carry their leader out of the cellar, I was a different person than when I went in.

For the first time, I felt the part of a huntsman.

I still had a lot to learn, and I knew it. It was just that now I knew that I could get there...I wasn't always going to be the weak link shouting strategy in the group...I was going to be able to be a true huntsman.

Eventually.

Anyway, back to Beacon. We continued to take evening classes and patrol around Beacon. Eventually, I helped come up with a bizarre plan to get the giant grimm off of the tower. I won't go into details, but it was just off-kilter enough to work and that really dropped the number of grimm in the area. We started go farther afield, patrolling and escorting. We made some solid lien and picked up solid experience, as well as academy credits. Then came the day that Taiyang Xiao Long sent word that the enemy appeared to be moving on Vacuo. Headmaster Oscar asked Ruby to go there and help deal with the situation. I don't know if he realized it, but there was no way that we were going to let Ruby go on such a mission by herself. We had almost reached the midpoint of the fall semester, but the road waits for nothing. We wrote off the classes we were attending as a lost cause, packed our bags and were on the trail again.

Here's something else you should know about the way that both Oscar and Qrow think: if an area is under attack, they are firm believers in taking the fastest transportation possible. On the other hand, if they suspect that an area is going to come under attack, they believe in the slow approach. I guess it makes sense to me; if you travel the back roads and talk to people on the way, you draw fewer suspicions onto yourself and you get a chance to hear news and rumors. The people you meet in the towns between the kingdoms aren't information brokers like the headmasters; but if you put them all together, there isn't much that they don't notice. We took a ship from Vale to a point about halfway to Vacuo and put our boots back on the road.

Fortunately, Ren and Nora had worked out their pent up drives by this point. Don't get me wrong, they were closer than ever and weren't about to cut out that portion of their relationship...they just had a little more restraint so they weren't in danger of tearing up whole forests when they went at it.

Once again, we were a wandering hunter band, trading our skills for what the folks could afford to pay us. As we did on our trip to Haven, we escorted caravans, eliminated bands of grim and bandits and patrolled forests and plains. A big difference, at least from my perspective, was that I started to enjoy the life. When we stopped in towns, I made it a point to sit in the inn's common room at night, listening to stories and gossip and supplying a bit of my own. Most town residents don't travel very much, so they both enjoyed and appreciated news. I hadn't realized it, but the long trek from Vale to Mistral, as well as my current trek, had given me good stories to tell. Local folks appreciated news from a town a few dozen leagues away, as well as news from distant kingdoms. I actually became sociable with strangers.

That last item might sound trivial, but it isn't. Locals are much more likely to talk to travelers who are friendly and forthcoming. This not only gave us leads to investigate, it let us know about hardships and dangers on the road ahead. That was important, because we had never traveled through desert before. As we traveled across the Isthmus that separates the west end of Sanus from the rest, the climate got drier and drier. Getting tips from locals and other travelers went a long way towards keeping us from dying of thirst out in the wasteland.

Another thing we did was attend the various celebrations and gatherings in the towns we passed through. The local musicians aren't the professional performers that you find in the kingdoms, but they can belt out some lively tunes. What the music and dancing lacks in polish and sophistication, they more than make up for in sheer exuberance. What I'm trying to get to, in my round about way, is that I started to really live again. I danced with the local girls but somehow, the first dance of the night and my last were always with Ruby.

Maybe I better clear something up right now. I don't care if you call it necking, making out, sparking or just kissing, I spent some time with a fair number of local girls during that trip, but that's as far as it went. I had my reasons. For one thing, a very good way of getting the locals mad at you is to take things too far with their daughters and sisters. At the time, it looked like I was going to be a career huntsman and the idea of coming back to a town a year or so after committing some indiscretions didn't appeal to me a great deal. For another thing, huntsmen are dependent on the towns; that's where we get food, clothing, services...you name it. If I left town after a bit of kissing and exploring, nobody was going to be upset and the next hunter team to pass through would still be welcome. If I took things too far and left a little me behind, the next welcome might be a lot more chilly.

It wasn't until a few more years passed that I found out how fortunate I was to have adopted that attitude.

There's not a whole lot more that I want to talk about that trip to Vacuo. By the time we got there, we were pretty accomplished at traveling the wastelands, we had picked up rumors that allowed us to guess where Cinder's base of operations was at, and we had gotten a little tougher. We met up with Ruby's father, Taiyang, as well as old friends Sun, Scarlet, Yang and Blake.

Shortly after we got there, all hell broke loose.

Cinder didn't have the firepower at Vacuo that she had assembled first at Vale and then at Mistral...but she really didn't need it. Vacuo is the least organized and has the smallest population of any of the kingdoms. Yes, the people who live there are incredibly tough, but they're scattered, mostly poor and there aren't very many. Trying to turn the people against each other is a waste of time, because they all have an 'us against the rest of the world' attitude anyway. At the time, I had never met Salem but I got the impression that she wasn't very forgiving. While Cinder had toppled Beacon, she didn't topple Vale. While she inflicted casualties and damage in Mistral, neither the kingdom nor Haven fell. Her attack on Shade didn't have the flair and the subtle planning that her other attacks had shown, it was just a sudden assault by White Fang and grimm. Still, it came close to working.

We weren't there for the big fight; so what I'm giving you is what I later heard from Yang and Blake, who were there. Taiyang was in the battle and tangled with the current leader of the violent White Fang. When Taiyang dropped the man, he refused to kill his opponent. That made the White Fang officers nearby listen to him a little and he managed to get most of them to understand that whomever was driving the grimm onto the kingdoms wasn't about to stop with humans; the faunas would be next. Emerald was also in the area, having turned her back on Cinder. Emerald is a self-centered thief, not an idiot, and she worked out that a world overrun by grimm wasn't a world she wanted. She did everything she could to make everyone nearby realize just how much Cinder was manipulating them.

Not all the White Fang turned, but enough did that when the grimm attacked, they were facing a fairly united front.

Where were we in the meantime? Team RNJR infiltrated Cinder's hideout and attacked her. It was a very, very near thing. Mercury was there, some very tough grimm were there, and Cinder had the power of the Fall Maiden. We took a beating but we managed to eliminate Mercury. In the end, Cinder had us at her mercy but she paused to gloat over us before she finished us off. My companions think that it was because she had such an ego, she needed to stoke it by relishing our helplessness. I prefer to think that after everything she had seen, she really didn't want to win. In the end, she was standing over me, her flame magic had heated my sword to the point that I couldn't touch it and she was drawing her bow on Nora, who had placed herself between Ren and danger. Ruby was down and I didn't know how badly she had been hurt so I did the only thing I could think of doing.

I swung my shield and drove the pointed end into Cinder's belly.

A lot of stories tell how a hero vanquishes the villain with a single stroke that takes her in the heart or lops off her head. I'm no hero and I'm especially no fairy-tale hero. Her arrow went wide, missing everything and I stumbled to my feet and just pounded on her with my shield, with no grace or skill, over and over until she quit moving. It wasn't a quick or clean death and I never would have managed it if we didn't outnumber her four to one at the end. I'm not proud of what I did, but I'm glad I managed it. The cost would have been too great if I hadn't.

At some point, something that I can only describe as pure energy burst out of Cinder's body and flew into Nora. My friend was staggered but suddenly looked stronger than I'd ever seen her. I didn't know it at the time, but Nora had just become the new Fall Maiden. Of course, we weren't interested in things like that, we had to help Ren and Ruby.

We were lucky; their injuries were bad but not life threatening and Oscar managed to reach us fairly soon after Cinder fell. The next few days were a bit of a blur to me; I was recovering from my own wounds and eliminating the woman who had killed Pyrrha had a profound affect on me. You'd think that I would have been happy, or at least content.

Instead, I was completely disoriented.

Going back to fairy-tales, when the hero kills the villain, that's supposed to be the end of the story. He's supposed to go back to his kingdom, home, or whatever and live happily ever after. The only problem was that killing Cinder didn't fix things. Pyrrha was still dead and no magic bell or light let me know that she was now resting in peace. I didn't have a kingdom and the home that I grew up in just wasn't my home anymore. Add to that, Nora needed some instruction in using her new powers and wherever she goes, Ren goes. The two boarded an airship and Oscar and General Ironwood let us know that it wouldn't be a good idea for me and Ruby to accompany them until Nora had a chance to come to grips with what she now was.

We took a week to let our wounds heal to the point where we were ready to travel. Blake and her father, Ghira, obviously wanted to get back to Menagerie and make sure that Salem wouldn't be able to make a move against the Faunas population while they were gone. Ruby, Yang and Taiyang wanted to get back to Patch. For some reason, I didn't want to go with them. Don't get me wrong, I wanted to go back to Beacon and continue my education but I wasn't ready to just climb on a ship and be there in a couple of weeks. I remember Taiyang and his daughters asking me why.

"I don't think I'm ready to just start classes and training again," I admitted, struggling to put things into words.

"And traveling across Sanus will make you ready?" Somehow, Yang wasn't mocking me by asking. She was honestly curious.

"I've heard sailors talk about how the sea can take away your grief," I told her, still trying to describe my feelings. "The road is that way with me. It's always there but always different. You can keep busy but still think things through while you're on the road. Somehow...I think that if I make the journey by foot again, I'll be ready to be a student by the time I get there."

I was expecting them to laugh at me. Instead, I saw confusion on Yang's face but understanding on Taiyang's and Ruby's. I agreed to travel north with them to catch a ship past the desert; I wasn't needing the road so badly that I was going to walk that wasteland again. Instead, we all took a ship past the isthmus and landed in a fishing town on the inside of the 'elbow' of Sanus. Once there, the others made arrangements for another ship while I looked for work that would take me in the right direction.

I remember standing outside the inn that night, looking at the stars. It was autumn again; this last mission had taken a full year already and it would be winter before I reached Vale. My last close companion would be aboard a ship in the morning, while I would be accompanying a caravan to an inland town. The night seemed dark and cold, but maybe that was the way it should be.

Maybe the bad times make you appreciate the good ones so much more.

I walked into the inn's common room to find Taiyang and his daughters having an intense conversation. I intended to walk well around them, giving them some privacy, but Yang spotted me and waved me over to them.

"I need some time to straighten things out, as well," Ruby told me. "If...if you'll have me with you, I'd like to make the trip back to Vale with you."

"Of course you're welcome," I told her. Suddenly, the world didn't seem so dark and cold.

The look Taiyang gave me wasn't hostile and it wasn't friendly. There was a sort of resignation about the look. He shook my hand and told me to take care of his daughter. That was odd, as Ruby was perfectly capable of taking care of herself. Still, I told him I would and we said our goodbyes, as we would be too busy in the morning to do so.

Like I said, the road waits for nobody and the tides don't, either.

We accompanied the caravan to the next town, took on a contract to round up a handful of bandits and continued to the next. There, we joined another three hunters and eliminated a grimm pack before continuing on again. It was our usual routine; trading our services for what we needed but it was different somehow. I started to notice Ruby's grace and poise. I noticed that her voice had changed slightly over the years, becoming somewhat melodious. Those eyes! Those silver, warrior's eyes! How I got lost in them whenever we were face to face.

In short, I noticed that she had grown from a quirky girl into a petite, beautiful young woman.

It wasn't right. We were teammates and partners. We were fellow hunters. We were good like that and any move on my part to change the dynamic could tear down what we had. Was I so weak that I couldn't maintain this very good thing that I had? I tried not to stare at her but she started to mesmerize me. Even when I noticed her giving me looks, probably weirded out by my behavior, I couldn't help myself.

I'll never forget the evening even though I forgot the name of the town. We had taken on a job to eliminate a deathstalker that was terrorizing the town. It was a big one and a tough fight, but we took it out. Upon our return, the headman decided to declare a celebration. Okay, the town was looking for an excuse to have a social event, they had just finished the harvest and it was time to celebrate anyway. The town had a large, common building where I swear everyone congregated. A few local musicians were playing lively tunes and the food was hearty, tasty and plentiful. Ruby and I were celebrities, so both of our dance cards were full. Somehow, I just couldn't get into the proper mood even though a very pretty girl had let me know that she'd like to hear some of my stories...in private. Instead, I politely excused myself and went outside to think.

The main street was deserted, so I walked about half a block and sat on the steps leading into a shop. For a long time, I stared at the moon and wondered about my future.

"Hey," a familiar and welcome...but somehow not welcome...voice addressed me.

"Hey," I looked to see Ruby standing next to me.

"You cut out pretty early," she told me. I made room for her on the stairs and she sat next to me.

"Just wasn't feeling it," I shrugged. "I hope I didn't offend anyone."

"No," she chuckled a little. "We're mysterious hunters. Of course we have memories that most townsfolk can't imagine haunting us. Her father is telling that blonde girl you were dancing with that you just don't want to burden anyone with your past."

"If it makes them feel better," I snorted. "I guess they can think of me as some hero."

"Jaune, what's wrong?" She asked, putting a hand on my arm.

How many times had one of us comforted the other with that gesture? How many times had that simple touch told the other that we would go through fire and blood for each other? So why did her touch set my nerves on fire right now?

Okay, I knew why so I got up and took a step away from her.

"Jaune?" She asked.

Two years ago, Pyrrha Nikos, a capable warrior and beautiful young woman couldn't even admit to a scroll that she loved me. Now here I was, a gawky, awkward, half-trained hunter in the same situation. The only thing I had going for me was that I had learned how much she wanted to say those words, and how much not saying them bothered her. A hunter's life is dangerous, so if you don't say something the first time you have a chance, you might not get a second.

"I don't want this to end," I admitted, my back to her. I couldn't bring myself to see how she might react. "You, me, together. The thought that someday we're going to just go our separate ways is just tearing me apart."

There, I'd said it. Maybe not a proper confession, but close enough.

"You're not just talking about being teammates, are you?" Her voice sounded very small.

"No," I admitted. "I...I..."

Now I couldn't say the words.

I heard the stairs creak as she got up. How could I have screwed this up so badly? I had just destroyed our friendship and we now faced a long, awkward trek home. I turned around to apologize, only to find that she hadn't walked away; she was now standing on the second stair, allowing her to look me straight in the eyes.

Those glorious, silver eyes were shedding tears now. By the dust of creation itself, what had I done?

"Ruby, I'm sorry," I stammered. "I..."

I never finished the statement. One small, strong hand reached out to rest on my chest while the other hand reached behind my head. Those glorious eyes closed as she pulled my face to hers.

Her lips were the sweetest thing I had ever tasted.

 _To be continued..._

* * *

 _A/N: Thanks to Joe Stoppinghem, for beta reading._


	2. The second Dance

Now, if this were the type of story that you read as a teenager and didn't mind it when mom and dad found the book, we would have immediately gone back to the dance. We would have gone to the dance and wowed everyone around us with our grace and synchronicity, declaring louder than words our love to the entire town, while all of the townsfolk applauded. We would have made the trip back home in the next couple of weeks without so much as a speck of dirt getting onto either of us and we would have found Ruby's father and sister inexplicably visiting my parents, allowing the two of us to declare that we had found what we were looking for in each other. All parties would have declared that they were just waiting for us to realize how much in love we were, and we would have gone off to our happy ending. We would have been married with everyone's blessing, save a handful of heartbroken young men and women who had their hearts set on the two of us. We would have had 2.4 beautiful, intelligent and incredibly talented kids, our floors would have never been dirty, our faucets never would have dripped and the toilets would have never clogged.

I'm sure you've figured out that's not what happened.

If this were the type of story from a book that you read as a teenager and hid where you _thought_ your parent's couldn't find it, we would have made out like...well...horny teenagers right there on the deserted street. After several minutes, our ardor would have driven us to rush, unnoticed by the townsfolk, to our room in the inn. There, we would have locked the door behind us and proceeded to make incredibly passionate love to each other. We would have aroused each other's desires to the point that we both screamed our passions to the heavens...and interestingly, nobody in the inn would have overheard it. There would have been no awkward moments undressing each other and no clumsy fumbling, despite neither of us really knowing what we were doing. There would have been no embarrassing body sounds and we would have politely climaxed at the exact same time, leaving us both satisfied and exhausted to the point that we would have fallen asleep in each others arms. There would have been no hasty rushing to the bathroom when we were finished, no bodily fluids left on the sheets and there would have been no inconvenient consequences from our actions.

Okay, you've probably guessed that things didn't go down this way, either.

What happened? Well, we spent several minutes kissing each other and I was so wrapped up in it that I lost track of time. Okay, that part _does_ sound like it came from a naughty teenagers' book. It was about that time that we realized that people were still coming and going from the town hall, just a couple of blocks down the street. I didn't know if anyone had seen us or not and even though we hadn't done anything really out of line...at least not for a dark street...we really didn't want to put ourselves on display. We shyly took each others hand and walked back to the inn.

I know what you're thinking, but it didn't happen that night. You have to understand that the relationship between Ruby and myself, be it partners, teammates and yes, even a romantic interaction always had three parties involved. Herself, myself and the road. One thing that dealing with the road had taught both of us was that you don't do foolish things unless the circumstances are absolutely dire. We had just professed our love for each other...that's not dire circumstances. Also, if you've never been outside of a kingdom's main city, much less outside of a kingdom, you don't realize that the conveniences to be found in the capital just aren't always present in a town. Namely, there probably isn't a 24 hour convenience store open when you just realized that you needed certain precautions.

I'm sure you understand what I'm trying to say. I was twenty-one at the time, Ruby was nineteen; but we were older than most people our age. We weren't about to do something foolish, no matter how much we wanted to. Instead, once we got to our room we changed into our pajamas and slipped into a single bed.

I'm not going to go into details of everything we did that night. I'll say that we kissed a great deal and that we explored each other a little. Yes, our hormones were in overdrive but we had that little issue of risk that we didn't want to play with. In addition, there was another issue. You see, the Battle of Beacon had been four years previous, and we had spent a very large amount of those four years together, on the road, dealing with various nasty things and situations. Maybe I was more of a problem than she was, but I'd like to think that she was having some problems as well. Okay, fine, I'll say it; while I loved this woman more than I loved life itself, I just couldn't make that quick change in my behavior. Did I desire her? Yes! But there was something awkward about acting on that desire. I needed time to adjust to this new reality and spending the night sleeping...SLEEPING!...with this lovely, wonderful young woman was a very good way to start.

It wound up being the best night's sleep I had since Pyrrha was killed.

I said before that the road waits for nobody. It doesn't wait for new love, either. We had already taken on a job to escort a grain shipment from this town to a mining town up in the mountains and new love or not, we couldn't afford the hit to our reputation if we weren't where we were supposed to be, when we were supposed to be there. Before dawn, we were in the town square as the trucks were assembling. Yes, I said trucks. Not every point outside the kingdoms lives at pre-industrialized technology. Often, it's a curious mix of high and low technology...but you get my drift. There were a dozen tractor-trailer rigs and we were in a four wheel drive, ready to go to wherever we were needed in the column.

I'm sure you're thinking that it was a quick and easy run up to the mining town; guess again. The roads between the towns out between the kingdoms aren't that great and they aren't paved, so you don't go running at over 100 kilometers per hour. You're lucky if you can maintain 30. Our vehicle was well out in front, so that we could spot obstacles and call back to the caravan so they wouldn't be on top of the obstruction before a work crew could clear it. That's where we came in. You see, grimm just aren't going to be much of a threat to a caravan moving down the road and bandits are going to have a hard time dealing with it, as well. On the other hand, a work crew trying to clear the road will attract grimm and a caravan backed up with no ability to maneuver will make bandits drool.

It took us three days to reach the mining town. Day one was uneventful but we fought off a grimm attack on day two, while a work crew was clearing a fallen tree from the road. That night, we had another grimm attack and on day three, we drove off a band of bandits. I killed two more people during that fight. I'm not proud of it and to this day it confuses me. The mining town needed more labor; those bandits could have made more lien and been safer if they had just gone up to the town and asked for jobs.

One thing that the bandit attack did was cement our reputation as a solid duo. Once inside the town walls, the caravan chief paid us our lien and told the village headman about our latest successes. We were invited to a meeting between them. The caravan would take three days to offload agricultural produce and take on raw iron. After that, they were going to travel another four days to a port city. Since it was roughly on our way, we agreed to stick around and escort them again. We spent those days patrolling outside the city, eliminating grimm and chasing off bandits.

I'm sure you may be wondering how Ruby and I were doing with this new aspect of our relationship. While on the road, we slept in separate sleeping bags and often took turns sleeping at night, making sure one of us was on guard at all times. We were too exhausted to do anything while in the mining town; not only were we on patrol the entire time, we were at a very high altitude, so we tired very quickly in the thin air. Then, we were off again, following the road to the coast.

We fought a couple of more grimm attacks during that journey, but they were common, weak grimm and didn't prove much of a challenge. The port town had a hunter team, so there wasn't work readily available for us. The caravan we were with was going to be heading southwest next, so we said our goodbyes. Our packs were full of provisions and we actually had a substantial amount of lien in our pockets, so we weren't concerned. The next town would be roughly a week's travel, even with winter coming on. The first night, I faced a hard decision; when we made camp, after checking the area and finding it safe, I completely unzipped my sleeping bag and set it out, like a blanket, on the ground. I then washed the supper dishes, pointedly not looking at my companion. When I got done with my domestic chores, I noted that Ruby had unzipped her bag and set it on mine, making one, large bed.

Okay, sorry to disappoint anyone looking for me to say that we consummated our desires that night. We were still in the open and vulnerable. While we had checked the area and found it safe, that didn't mean that it would stay safe. Grimm, natural predators and our fellow man were all possible assailants and we didn't want to become so distracted that something, or someone, could sneak up on us.

Still, that was the warmest I had ever slept while camping out in the winter.

The road was doing its work; Ruby and I were coming to grips with our losses, our lives and what we wanted to be to each other. I was managing to look at her not just as a partner and teammate; but as a lover as well. Our trail took us to and then over a low range of hills. I guess they were old hills, as there were a lot of caves to be found in them. On the third day out of the port town, four days' travel from our next destination, we made camp in a shallow cave.

What's really lousy about traveling by foot in winter is the short days. There are only a handful of hours to travel and set up the night's camp. When we saw the cave near a large stream, we realized that we weren't going to find a better site yet that day, so we called an early halt. Before long, we had a fire burning at the cave entrance, a pile of rocks to reflect the heat back into the shelter, a pile of additional firewood handy and trip-cords set around to warn us if anything, or anyone approached. We piled evergreen branches on the floor, so it wasn't muddy. I even managed to catch a couple of trout from the stream, so we had some fresh food to go with our travel rations. It was still early, even though it was dark, when we finished our meal and Ruby filled a couple of collapsible buckets and set them near the fire to warm. I knew what she was doing; since we had the time, shelter and firewood, it was time to clean up a little.

That's another thing about traveling by foot. Usually, you don't have the firewood needed to maintain light and warmth through the night. The fire is for cooking and it gets very cold when you're camping in the open so usually, you go to sleep when the meal is done. Here, we had plenty of wood, plenty of water and a shelter to keep the heat in. While it wasn't as nice as an inn, it was very pleasant for seasoned travelers. Something else about seasoned travelers; we're very good at giving each other our privacy. After the water had warmed and she pulled out some cloths, a towel and soap, I went to the back of the cave, turned my back on her and started to clean and polish my armor and Crocea Mors. I took my time and refused to look her way, even though the shadows she was casting on the wall were very interesting.

She eventually finished and took my place, maintaining Crescent Rose while I cleaned myself up. Afterwards, I refilled the buckets and carefully banked the fire. It was nice and warm in the cave, so I pulled on my pajamas, looking forward to a very restful night. Then, I saw Ruby.

She had brushed out her hair and it looked incredibly soft and inviting. She was wearing her pajamas and standing next to our blankets; mine was on the ground, hers was on top and turned back. She looked both demure and bold at the same time. She said my name and then dropped her gaze, not able to finish the thought out loud.

She didn't need to.

The road had done its job; while I still mourned my losses, I was ready to move on with my life. While killing Cinder hadn't brought closure, I now realized that closure that complete just wasn't in the cards. I was also ready, finally, to view Ruby as a lover, as well as a friend, companion, partner and teammate. It was pretty clear that the road had done its job on her, as well.

Oh, and I had taken the opportunity, in the mining town, to purchase precautions.

In a way, I felt guilty about this. I should have arranged for a nice room, or at least a comfortable one at an inn...not a cave in the winter night. It should have been silk sheets, or at least an inn's sturdy flannel, not a pair of sleeping bags on a bed of cedar boughs. It should have been after a fine dinner, or at least a hearty one, not a mixture of travelers' rations and fresh fish. It should have been romantic candlelight, not flickering firelight.

Okay, that last one wasn't so bad, but you get the idea.

Again, I'll say that during the trip to Vacuo, there were several times when I wound up kissing local girls. That's about all that happened, for reasons I've already pointed out. I knew that Ruby occasionally spent some time with local boys, but what she did was her business. I'm only saying this to point out that she must not have done anything with those boys that I didn't do with the girls. I wish that I could say that our first time was an incredible experience for us, in which we flamed our passions to unbelievable heights, but that would be a lie.

Neither one of us knew what we were doing, so it was clumsy. We eventually got it right and while it was enjoyable, it seemed overrated.

We were young, fit, hadn't traveled terribly far that day and didn't have much else to do; which meant that about a half hour after we finished, we went for round two. During round two, when she was clinched around me, her small but strong hands clamped onto my butt, her back arched, her head thrown back and what I can only describe as _the expression_ on her face, I realized what all the fuss was about. Suddenly, Nora and Ren's energetic activities at every opportunity made sense.

Judging by her reaction, she had figured out what all the fuss was about, as well.

Afterwards...well, after visits to our makeshift privy and some cleanup time with the still-warm water by the fire, we cuddled close. Contrary to stereotypes, Ruby fell asleep fairly quickly while I spent some time staring at the cave's ceiling. During that time, I tried to come to grips with how a wonderful, capable young woman like her could be willing to attach herself to me this way. I loved her; I knew that beyond a shadow of a doubt and I pledged myself to being worthy of the love she showed me.

I also was stunned by the bundle of contradictions that she presented me. She could kill an attacking nevermore...and get completely freaked out if she collided with a bird. She was tough as nails, and loved cookies. She gave me, Nora, and Ren the courage to trudge across two continents in a quest for answers...but needed a hand on her shoulder and a friendly voice now and then. She could jump into a melee without a thought towards her own safety, keep her head in the most dire of circumstances...but she liked to be the little spoon.

I held her close and the two of us slept warm and well through the rest of the long, winter night.

You'd think that our history would have made our transition to lovers an easy thing...it didn't. A whole new chapter had opened to us and we really didn't know to fit this in with the friendship we had already developed. I'm sure you guessed it; the road came to our rescue. There isn't much to do on a long trudge except talk and since there weren't many travelers on the road, we had privacy to talk things through. Much to our frustration, the following days didn't give us an opportunity to continue our new activity. You see, the traveling and camping conditions were horrid; a wet snow fell almost constantly. Even though we were healthy young people in love, spending all day slogging through icy mud, followed by camping the night in the open with barely enough dry wood to warm your food just isn't conducive to romance.

We reached the next town, one devoted to the timber industry, as the sun went down on the fourth day out of the cave. As luck would have it, it was under attack by grimm when we arrived. The town wasn't in a great deal of danger, as the grimm hadn't broken through the walls and the residents were holding their own, but we jumped in anyway. We quickly cleared the dark creatures and the residents gave us a warm welcome. We spent two days in that town, planning our next move, recovering from the previous slog and yes, indulging in the new aspect of our relationship.

A nice thing about lumbering towns, there's always plenty of scrap wood for firewood. If we spent more than two waking hours during those two days more than twenty feet from the nearest fire, I'd be surprised.

I told you that the traveling conditions were terrible. Well, most seasoned hunters had already figured this out and had found warm places to hole up, so our services were in demand as we continued. As we got closer to Vale, modern technology became more common, so we were able to pick up our pace. We took on several escort jobs for motorized convoys; making a reasonable amount of lien as well as paying for our upkeep. We had a tidy sum in our pockets when we reached the kingdom itself. Competition for hunters' work was greater in the kingdom, but we still managed to reach my hometown in time for the Solstice Festival, with a few more lien to our name.

I said before that if you want to find out how much you've grown, you should visit home. Of course, I had called my folks as soon as I picked up a scroll signal. They had a couple of days of warning that we were coming and were delighted to have us show up. When we arrived, mom took one look and gasped at me. I'll admit that I had probably filled out my frame a little more...wearing armor all day will do that to you. I had some burn scars on the side of my face and on my right hand...courtesy of Cinder...but they had been light to begin with and aura had made them fade. It was only when I saw someone who knew me from before the Battle of Vacuo and whom I hadn't seen since that I realized how much things had changed.

On my side, I got the full dose of how many more gray hairs had taken up residence on my parents' heads since I had last seen them. My two sisters who were still at home had matured into pretty young women. I had an additional shock when my two oldest sisters, with husbands, came by to visit. Ivoire had turned me into an uncle while we were in Vacuo and Cerise would be doing so again, in a few weeks. Another of my sisters, Souci, was now engaged. Times like those that made it clear that time continued to move, no matter what you were doing. I also learned that the first grandchild is seldom set down when visiting grandparents. Okay, I wasn't infatuated with my nephew but I wanted to hold him just a little. Mom and dad were determined to monopolize all of the available time.

I remember my oldest sister getting me alone during the visit and asking me what I had planned for the future. She got a twinkle in her eye when I said that we planned on finishing our educations at Beacon. I should have realized I was being set up to a certain extent. My mother and her two oldest daughters were always a clever trio. Mom and Ivoire had conveniently gotten up from the couch, which they were sharing with Ruby, as I walked back into the living room. As was my custom, I sat down right next to Ruby. As per her custom, she edged closer to me, so that we were in contact from knee to shoulder. My parents, four present sisters, two brothers-in-law, and I swear my nephew and Zwei, all got knowing, approving looks on their faces. Without even asking, my family had learned that Ruby and I were a couple.

Look, I wasn't embarrassed about our relationship but I wasn't about to flaunt it, either. While I couldn't see the two of us going our separate ways in the future, I didn't know it would become permanent. Hunters on the road tend to value what privacy they have and that includes the details of our personal lives. It actually made things easier on my folks. Mother asked if the two of us would mind sharing my old room, to which Ruby replied that we had shared a room many times, so it would be no hardship for us. I thought this a clever response, as it did not reveal just how close we were.

Okay, another piece of information is needed right now; space on the road can be limited. There were several times, before we got together, that we had to share a bed at an inn. This was a fact of life for hunters and we quickly learned to think nothing of it. For a couple of people who spend so much time in close proximity, closeness doesn't equal intimacy. This was part of the reason we needed some time to adjust our emotions after we realized we desired each other. My family knew enough about the hunters' life to realize that us sharing a room, and a bed, didn't mean we were lovers.

The hours passed and my other sisters showed up, to delighted greetings all around. As much as I may claim that growing up with seven sisters was a trial, I dearly loved them all and this was the first time, since I had left for Beacon four years previously, that we were all together at the same time. We all pitched in to help my mother prepare a feast. Finding space for everyone to dine was a bit of a challenge but the togetherness made the close proximity pleasant. Ruby had difficulty making new friends in those days, but because my family was so willing to accept her into its ranks, she felt right at home. The meal was wonderful and so was the wine.

Maybe I should clarify something else, Ruby and I had the occasional drink during our travels, but never to excess. We didn't overindulge that evening but we didn't understand how a small amount can drop inhibitions just a bit. That evening, as the last of us weary travelers found our way to our rooms, I held her close in the bed that was no longer my own. She snuggled close and put her lips to my ear.

"Do you want to let everyone know just how together we are?" She whispered.

"Ruby, that's evil!" I whispered in protest, but I had been thinking much the same thing. "I'm not about to make love to you just to let my family know that we're intimate."

"So what do you want to do?" She punctuated her question with a nibble to my neck.

"I want to make love to you because I love you."

She simply giggled into my mouth and wrapped her arms around me. I did the same to her.

Okay, we tried to be quiet. I have no doubt that we were a great deal more discrete than back in the cave, but we could only be so subtle about the whole thing. The next day my two youngest sisters, who shared the room that bordered ours, spent most of the day blushing and giggling at us. Those two girls have never been known for keeping secrets, so by the end of the day, the whole family must have known that we were lovers.

Since nobody addressed the two of us directly about it, they must have approved.

Either that, or they were weirded out by our behavior. You see, we had to keep ourselves trained, so at sunup the next day, we were in the front yard, drilling against each other. Ruby was still considerably better than me, but I had closed the gap to the point that she got a real workout by fighting me. We did our usual routine, warm up, basic forms, then one-on-one sparring. By the time we were done, my family was plastered to the various windows and several of the neighbors were, as well. I guess we were the neighborhood entertainment for the morning.

Shortly after breakfast (with my two youngest sisters giggling at us the entire time, you know why) mom and dad hustled Ruby and I into the car and dragged us downtown. They quickly split the two of us up, with Mom dragging Ruby to a women's fashion store and dad dragging me into one devoted to men's clothing. Dad insisted that it was his treat to purchase me a proper suit for the upcoming festival. The shop owner himself helped us pick it out and promised to take care of the alterations immediately, as a sign of respect for a huntsman.

"But I still haven't graduated from the academy," I pointed out to him.

"Young man, you fought in the Battle of Beacon, did you not?"

"Yes," I admitted.

"And the Battle for Mistral?"

"I was there," I agreed.

"There was also a battle at Vacuo recently," he pointed out.

"Yeah, I wound up there, as well," I told him, idly rubbing the burn mark on my hand.

"And you deny being a huntsman," he smiled gently at me.

I took the opportunity to purchase some casual clothes before we left; since the one set I carried with me was getting raggedy and decidedly tight. After that, dad whisked me to the barber shop before I really knew what was happening. The rest of the day passed in a bit of a blur, but since I was spending time with my father it was fine. When we met up with mother and Ruby, it was obvious that she had received a similar treatment from my mother. That evening as we sat around the house, my family wheedled stories of our travels from us. It wasn't until my own parents were sitting there, amazed at our adventures, that it sunk into me how much we had already done.

That night, Ruby and I decided to not partake in any activities. My two youngest sisters were giggling at us enough already.

The next morning, we were training again. Several of the neighbors actually came outside to watch us, which wasn't that different from the towns between the kingdoms. Dad made a joke about charging admission to watch us and there were handshakes and greetings all around. It was another day of reconnecting with my family and I started to feel very sorry about keeping Ruby from hers. When I told her as much, she informed me that she expected me to spend an equivalent amount of time at her home. That night was the Solstice Festival, so that evening, my father chased me into my old room to change into my suit while mom dragged Ruby into my parents' room. I was ready first and I hate to admit it, but the rather surprised looks on my sisters' faces when I showed up in the living room were gratifying. I guess I clean up pretty well.

My smug thoughts went right out the window when Ruby showed up. She wore something similar to what she wore at the Beacon dance...was it four years ago? It was a little longer on her legs than the one she had worn when I had toasted us as the socially awkward, but it showed off her figure every bit as well. I knew that she didn't like heels and that my mother could be just as stubborn as her, so the two had apparently compromised with some wedges. I had always liked her hair but now, with it pulled back to cascade down her neck, switching from black to red as it reached her shoulders...

She was stunning.

My huntsman's discipline at least kept me from gawking, open-mouthed. I almost didn't notice the way her eyes widened when she saw me. I remember stuttering something about how beautiful she looked, seeing her blush just a little and then we were standing together and it only seemed logical to kiss her.

My younger sisters...those impish banes of our visit, actually squealed and applauded us. My mother had to wipe away a couple of tears and my dad's eyes were also moist when he announced that we had better get going. Ruby was still a little less than graceful in her footwear, but it just gave me an excuse to offer her my arm. The evening passed in a blur, but it was a good blur. I saw old friends and introduced them to my partner, teammate and girlfriend. While it was good to see old teachers, classmates and other acquaintances, it was clear that I had aged faster in the intervening years than most of them. Our goals and dreams seemed so different now.

The most important thing was that for the first time, Ruby and I were attending a dance as a couple. We danced with others. For one thing, I had to dance with my mother and the four sisters who attended. Ruby danced with my brothers-in-law, father and several old friends of mine. At the end, we shared the last dance and we left with her holding my arm. If the dance in the farming community was the first significant dance of my life, this one was the second.

I've already said this several times, and I will probably say it several more times; the road waits for nobody. The few days with my family had been a wonderful interlude but sometimes having the road as a taskmaster is a good thing...it doesn't allow you to tarry longer than you have to. We were on a schedule; we had to get to Patch in two days if we were going to spend some quality time with her family before moving on to Beacon and preparing for the spring semester. The next morning, I was in my armor and Ruby was in her combat attire. Our new formal clothing was hung in my old room, awaiting the day we would have a semi-permanent address for it to be sent to. My parents and two youngest sisters accompanied us and Zwei to the ferry dock. The farewells and promises to keep in touch were heartfelt and moving. I was growing up and it appeared that I was growing apart from my family. I sobbed as the boat pulled clear of the dock and set course for Patch.

The road is still the road, whether it's walking a muddy trail or standing at a ship's rail. Like the sea taking away a sailor's melancholy, the road took away mine. I spent most of the day watching the shore pass by on the starboard side, marveling in the fact that I didn't have to be walking to make the kilometers pass by. As the day wore on, Ruby became more excited, eager to see her home again. We chatted about our plans for Beacon, about the fact that Nora and Ren weren't answering our calls, and our hopes to finish our educations.

As evening came on, we had a hearty meal in the ship's galley before taking a last stroll around the deck. Ruby broached a subject to me.

"Jaune," I can remember her telling me. "I don't think it would be a good thing to let dad and Yang know that we're intimate."

I remember feeling hurt by that and I probably wasn't quick enough to keep the expression from my face. Okay, we hadn't actually come out and told my family that we were lovers...but we didn't go out of our way to keep it a secret. The fact that they put us in my old room, with one bed, and the chatterbox nature of my youngest sisters meant that they had to know.

"It's not you!" She grabbed my hands and turned me to face her. "I'm glad we're what we are! But dad and Yang...I'm sure they still see me as a little girl. It's different with you, you're not the youngest and you're actually taller than your dad! When he had to look up just a bit to look you in the eye, it became obvious that you had grown. I'm not a very big person, so it's going to be hard for dad and Yang to accept that I'm not fifteen anymore."

"You know your family better than I do," I sighed. Her uncle Qrow was already a point that the two of us had learned to agree to disagree, I didn't want her father and sister to be the same. Then, a thought occurred to me. "You're bringing me home with you," I pointed out. "So I guess that says something about us, to them."

"Exactly," she stepped closer and leaned against me...a gesture that was sort of ruined by the fact that I was wearing my armor. "I want dad to get comfortable with the idea of having you around me."

"Do we tell him that we're dating?" I asked her.

"You can tell him that you're my boyfriend," she informed me. "Tell him that I threatened you with great bodily harm if you said anything more than that."

"Are you threatening me with bodily harm?" I asked her, in what I hoped was a playful, teasing tone.

"No," her posture and tone became very serious. "You've taken enough of a beating on these adventures." She ran a light finger along my right forearm. "I promise you this; no matter what the future holds, I'll never harm you."

"I'm hoping the future keeps us together," I told her.

She melted into my embrace, which couldn't have been comfortable with my armor. We stood there for what seemed like a long time until...

"We have a private cabin tonight," I reminded her. "The walls aren't terribly thick, but we probably won't be seeing most of our fellow passengers again."

So we had ourselves a little feast, of sorts, before the famine that was going to be our visit to Taiyang Xiao Long. None of our fellow passengers said anything the next day, but Zwei gave us some really odd looks.

Do you want to know how much Taiyang missed his youngest daughter? He and Yang weren't waiting at home for us to arrive, they were waiting at the dock for us to disembark. The scene was like cheesy movies or literature, we were walking down the gangplank when Ruby spotted her father and sister in the crowd. She dropper her pack (leaving me to pick it up) and jumped into her father's arms. The three of them clamped together in a tight, group hug while I stood nearby, trying not to look too awkward and Zwei circled them, barking up a storm. Eventually, Yang disentangled herself from the group and extended a hand so that we could grip wrists, hunters' style. She used this grip to pull me in for a quick hug, giving me a solid thump on the back with her free hand.

It was over four years previous, but sometimes seemed like only a week, that she had laughed at me while I was pursuing Weiss.

Okay, that infatuation had to have been amusing...for everyone except Weiss.

Once he got free of his younger daughter, Taiyang also gripped my wrist and gave me an appraising look. I must have passed his inspection, because he clapped me on the shoulder. When I greeted him as "Mr. Xaio Long" he insisted that I refer to him as Taiyang, saying that I was a huntsman now. When I pointed out that I hadn't graduated yet, he rolled his eyes slightly before steering Ruby onto the road to his home. Yang relieved me of Ruby's pack and the two of us followed father and younger daughter, while Taiyang pumped Ruby for details of her trip back to Patch. Surprisingly, Yang and I had a nice conversation, as well.

Taiyang Xaio Long's home was a couple of kilometers outside of the town of Patch, which meant that it was a large home with plenty of space around it. It also meant that I had a chance to get caught up a little, through the conversation with Yang. It seemed that Taiyang was getting lonely; Yang had taken a part time teaching job at Signal while attending classes part time at Beacon. She had moved into an apartment in Patch and while Taiyang saw her almost every day, he didn't have her at home with him.

I guess that explains why he wanted Zwei back.

When we got to Taiyang's home, we discovered that Blake was also staying with him for a short time. Blake and Yang were in the girls' old room, Ruby would be in the guest room and I would get the couch. It wasn't a problem for me; Taiyang's couch was a lot more comfortable than the ground. The only issue I had was that if Taiyang knew at the time the actual status between Blake and Yang, as well as Ruby and myself, the two couples could have had the two rooms and everyone would have been happier.

Except maybe for Taiyang.

Ruby wanted to visit her mother while it was still light. The other three...four if you count Zwei...chose to let her have a private visit, yet she asked me to accompany her. To this day, I don't know if she did so to let her family know that I was something more than a teammate or because she wanted to include me in what was to her a very emotional, private moment. Of course, she might have figured out that my shield would be pretty good shovel and that I would be willing to clear the snow from the stone. Anyway, I left her alone for her talk. As with those other times where I had been with her, she looked happier after speaking but this time, she gave me a bit of a sultry look when she was done. I strongly suspect that she told her mother that we were intimate.

There wasn't much time to dwell on this, because when we returned to her home, we found out that Yang was just as rowdy and energetic as she had ever been. Even though it was dark out, Taiyang's outdoor lights illuminated enough of the yard to act as a training square. Sure, it was cold out, but fights don't care about the weather. I was soon sparring against Yang while the others watched. As expected, she could handle me hand-to-hand but I put up much more of a fight that I expected to. To my surprise, Taiyang insisted that we take up weapons and try it again.

This is a good time to explain something about aura. I have a lot of it, which means I can take a pounding in a fight. It doesn't mean that I _like_ taking a pounding in a fight; it's still painful. Something else about aura; when you take up weapons and armor, your aura strengthens them. This is why I could set my shield on the ground and someone could shoot a hole through it but if I'm using it to defend myself, dust rounds will bounce off. Final piece of information; my aura is depleted in proportion to how it has to defend. This means that hits to my shield, sword or armor barely deplete my aura but a gunshot to my body results in a considerable drain.

Okay, back to the story at hand. You have to be careful when fighting Yang. Her semblance means that the more you hit her, the harder she can hit you. This means that you have to deplete her aura to the point that you can take her out, all while making her stronger, without letting her get in a finishing shot on you. The best way is to goad her into unleashing on you, so she can't build up her hyper-strength. Of course, she's perfectly aware of this, as well.

Our match started out how it usually does when I'm faced off against someone with guns; she fired rounds at me while I tried to close the distance. I've gotten pretty good at blocking with my shield and sword, but she still managed to catch me on the foot with a shot. Remember that I said that I feel the pain even if I don't take the damage? Yeah, I wasn't in a good mood when I finally got close enough to fight her.

Now it was my turn; I have a longer reach than she does, especially when I have my sword. I started out with a series of thrusts while keeping out of her range. She managed to block most of them but enough got through her defense to get her notice. Yang doesn't like pain any more than I do, so I wasn't only depleting her aura and building up her semblance, I was getting her angry as well. With Yang, that tends to be a mixed blessing. You would think that her anger would have made her attack recklessly. It didn't; her anger led her to block recklessly.

Another little lesson here, something that separates the novice huntsman from true huntsman. Back when we started our long journey to Mistral, I was able to deliver a single thrust or a single slash with close to the same power and accuracy as a seasoned huntsman. What I couldn't do was deliver them without setting up or let my attacks flow together. If I missed a thrust, I had to recover and line up another one rather than use the momentum to deliver another attack. Over the years, both my skill and my endurance had built up to the point that I could use the wasted force from a missed attack to unleash another one.

She got angry and parried one of my thrusts with more energy than she should have. Instead of recovering, I went with the motion, turning slightly and hitting her in the mouth with my sword pommel. She staggered back and I kept with my motion, spinning around and thrusting again. This time, she swatted Crocea Mors to her outside, which should have opened me up to attack. Instead of scrambling to recover, I went with the motion again. Her counter punch deflected off of my shield and I managed to clip her in the head with the edge of it.

Yang was no fool. I'll take a strong but dumb opponent any day over a weak but smart opponent. Yang was both smart and strong. She spun, bringing up a kick that I parried with my sword. She maintained her motion with a backfist that could have taken my head off if I hadn't gotten my shield back up. Her follow-up punch, however, got past my shield and caught me on the shoulder. It didn't help that she fired a dust round, depleting my aura and inflicting considerable pain.

Four years previous, I would have backed off and tried to get my wits straightened out. But four years on the road meant that I didn't. I lashed out with a kick of my own and caught her supporting knee. She let out a yelp and I kept on the attack, landing a thrust that dug into her other thigh. With her reeling backwards, I managed a solid shield-strike into her jaw again. Her aura was seriously depleted but when she got her balance back, her eyes were flashing red and I swore I could see flames flickering all around her. I had successfully gotten her very angry.

Yea me.

Four years previously, I would have blocked her punches with my shield and she would have eventually worn me down and gotten a telling strike through. On this day, I parried her punches, directing the shots away from me rather than meeting them head-on. Her first punch I parried with my blade and the next two I parried with my shield. On the last, I spun away from the shot and unleashed a backhand slash to the back of her knee. She dropped and even though I used the flat of the blade, it hit hard enough to punch through her depleted aura and give her lacerations on both her thigh and her calf. Taiyang called an immediate halt and she looked up at me, wide-eyed.

I want everyone to know that I absolutely hate the idea of anyone I care about looking at me with fear. Yang might have teased me when we were both Beacon Students; she may have heckled me about my inability to get Weiss to go out with me but I still considered her a solid friend. I didn't feel guilty about the cuts I had given her; she would heal them in a couple of hours after her aura replenished enough to take care of it. It was only after I had a moment to think beyond the contest that I realized what she had; if I had used the edge of my blade, she would have been short a leg.

It was very similar to the strike that the late and unmourned Adam Taurus had removed her arm with.

NOW I felt guilty. She was having some trouble using the leg, so I sheathed my blade and gave her a hand up. Taiyang said something about getting her inside so I got my shoulder under her arm and took the weight off of her leg. The only problem with that was that I had gotten taller, making it awkward for her to walk, so I simply picked her up and carried her into the house. Ruby held the door for us and Taiyang pointed me towards the couch. When I set her down, she grabbed me by the side of my head and gave me a quick talking to.

"I was nervous about Ruby being on the road with just you," she hissed at me. "Until just now. You two take care of each other, you hear me?"

Of course I nodded. She wasn't telling me to do anything I wasn't doing already.

But that was Yang. She took no offense at the cuts or the loss. She never tried to get even for the scare I had given her. It was part of the competition, so she could shrug off the effects as soon as they healed up. Once I proved that I was capable, she was cool with me and Ruby facing the world without backup.

There weren't any great festivals or other celebrations while we were on Patch, but that didn't mean the time was boring. I guess when a family of musicians gets together, there's a lot of music. When a family of artists gets together, a lot of art gets created. When a family that specializes in personal combat gets together, there's a lot of pain. We trained and sparred a great deal. On one occasion, Taiyang had me and Ruby team up against Blake and Yang. It wasn't pretty; Ruby and I had been working together for so long that we clobbered the two of them.

I think it was that evening that Ruby asked if I could take a short walk into town while the family discussed something. Let me clarify; she asked me, not me and Blake, to take a walk to town so that the family could discuss something. Yeah, I pretty much got the picture. I wasn't hurt by not being included, I was hurt because Yang was ready to admit to an adult relationship while Ruby wasn't. I was halfway to Patch before I recalled that Ruby was two years younger than Yang...the youngest in her family. Like she had told me earlier, it was the fact that she was the youngest, not that she was with me, that made her hesitate to tell her father she was in a relationship. I started to fume again but realized that I wasn't any better. After all, I hadn't come out and even told my folks that she was now my girlfriend...I had let them deduce everything. How did that make Ruby feel?

I was felling a little chagrined by the time I reached town. Remember, it was winter so I found a fast food place and had a quick bite to eat, which really gave me a chance to warm up before walking back. On the road back, I made some more decisions. Well, actually they were points of view that I wanted to bring up to Ruby, in private. When I reached the house, I was faced with the dilemma of whether or not to knock yet. Had I given them enough time? Deciding that I hadn't, I decided to take a little walk around the neighborhood. It was cold, but I was well bundled and because I was moving, I was warm. When I reached the house, I decided that I still hadn't given them enough time.

I walked the neighborhood four times before Ruby sent me a text on my scroll, telling me that the drama had been over in a matter of minutes and that I should be careful coming back, as the neighbors said they had spotted someone, or something, wandering the area. I had a very sheepish look on my face when I reached the door and was welcomed inside.

Teams JNPR and RWBY had been close, so while I wasn't exactly close friends with Blake, I was something more than just an acquaintance. Both she and Yang apologized for me having to go for a long, cold walk but I brushed it off, saying that I understood that things might have been awkward and it would have been easier for me to not be around if they had. Somehow, there was less tension in the house that night. It was almost a pity that we were heading to Beacon in the morning.

Headmaster Oscar had made some changes to the Beacon curriculum; trying to accommodate the students whose schedules had been affected by the temporary closing of the school. This was why we were heading to Beacon a couple of weeks before the spring semester was scheduled to start. Among the changes, the headmaster wanted to test students like us, who had spent time acting as hunters. He was going to give us credit for courses we had, essentially, learned on the road. After that, he wanted time for the administration to place us in classes where we would actually learn something, as well as use our experience to teach others.

A pretty good plan, which probably explains why I never would have thought of it.

Anyway, we took the airship to Vale and then caught one to Beacon. For several minutes, we just stared at the campus. The last time we had seen it, we had just removed the dragon from the tower, so there was still a lot of damage evident. Glynda had put in some serious effort in the meantime: while there were subtle changes, it looked _good_ again.

Somehow, it felt like coming home.

Ruby must have felt the same way, because her small hand slipped into mine and she led the way towards the nearest kiosk of information boards. We had to get our room assignments and schedules, and we were both eager to get started. My enthusiasm waned a great deal, the opposite reaction of my girlfriend, when we saw who was waiting for us at the board.

Qrow Branwen.

Let's get everything clear about Qrow and myself. I don't like the man. Ruby loves, trusts and admires him and he once used that love, trust and admiration to manipulate her into making the trip across Sanus and Anima, using her as bait to draw out Salem's minion. I hate him for his smug superiority, so similar to Winter Schnee's. I hate him for his almost constant drunkenness. I hate the fact that he openly tells half the truth and considers anyone who doesn't get the whole message to be a fool.

I hate that he was part of the group that backed Pyrrha into a hard choice, and maneuvered her into a position where she couldn't make any decision other than the one they had chosen for her; a choice that cost her her life.

Yet, I admire him at the same time. He had the guts to walk away from the bandit tribe that raised him, knowing that what they were doing was wrong. When he learned what his semblance was, he had the guts to take on a lonely, vagabond life, so he wouldn't harm those he loved. When Tyrian attacked us, he threw himself into the fight and didn't use me, Ren and Nora as cannon fodder. He's even willing to pass on the hard lessons that he's learned, even if he insults and belittles his students while doing so.

Of course, Ruby let go of my hand and flew toward the man, capturing him in a massive hug. From over her shoulder, he gave me a respectful nod. He knows that I don't much care for him but he respects me at least a little. I guess it's because I helped haul him towards Mistral when he couldn't walk.

"Isn't greeting students a little below the station of a professor?" I asked him. Despite my efforts, I couldn't keep all of the animosity out of my voice.

"You're special students," he shrugged, mussing up Ruby's hair. "And your situation is going to be special, as well. Oz wanted me to have a few words with the two of you, make sure you understood things."

"The text we received was pretty thorough," I remarked, falling in step behind him and my girlfriend.

"As far as what we were willing to send...yeah." He told us. "There's something else. The two of you are going to have roommates. The old four person team rule is still in effect. The only thing is, these are special roommates and Oz wanted to make sure you understood you had to keep your mouths shut about them."

"Who are they?" Ruby demanded, hanging on to his arm and shouting with all the enthusiasm of a kid given a birthday present.

I was less excited.

"If you're rooming us with members of old Team CRDL or Emerald, there's going to be trouble," I told him.

"Nah, we're not that dumb," he waved off the suggestion. "You'll get along just fine. Tell you what, your room is just up ahead in the senior wing. Your roommates are already there, just knock before you barge in. Your first round of tests are tomorrow morning, so I'll catch you tomorrow afternoon."

"But I have so many questions!" Ruby howled, sounding like she was fifteen again.

"So do I, kiddo," he chuckled. "We'll wait for tomorrow evening. I'll treat you and your boyfriend to dinner and we can catch up."

"I saw the hand-holding," he smirked at us, seeing our shocked looks. "We can talk about that, as well. Now, go introduce yourselves to your new roommates and remember, mouths shut until we can talk."

He carefully unwrapped her arms from his and gave her a gentle nudge in my direction. He gave his usual, carefree and mocking wave and ambled off. With nothing else to do, the two of us made our way to the senior wing and to our room. We studiously avoided talking about her uncle. Finally, we found ourselves staring at a plain door.

"Home for the next five months," I told her. "Maybe longer."

"We might as well introduce ourselves to our new roommates," she sighed. Remembering her uncle's instructions, she knocked first. Upon hearing a muffled, but familiar, voice welcoming us to come in, she put her scroll to the scanner.

The door swung open to reveal Nora Valkyrie and Lie Ren.

 _To be continued._


	3. The Third Dance

We didn't accomplish very much for the next several minutes.

You don't go on two cross-continental journeys, face foes and internal demons and fight three attempts to overthrow kingdoms with people and not develop a strong, emotional attachment. I don't know which faculty member had the brilliant idea, but Ren and Nora didn't have any more clue than we did as to who their roommates would be. One moment, they were wondering when their new roommates would show up. The next moment, a knock on the door left them wondering who their new roommates would be. The next moment, Team RNJR was back together.

I tried for a dignified, wrist grip with Ren, but failed completely. This man was like a brother to me and seeing him again, safe, well and apparently happy was too much. We pulled each other into a tight embrace, murmuring to each other that it was good to see each other again. When I finally managed to let him go, I noted that Nora and Ruby had missed each other just as much. Then, it was time to change partners. Nora grabbed me while Ren and Ruby reconnected. At some point, we realized that we didn't need to be standing in hallway with tears of joy and relief running down our faces. We ducked into the privacy of our room, made ourselves comfortable and caught up with each other.

Ruby and I went first. Sitting side-by-side on one of the beds, we told them about our recovery from our wounds and the trip home. We told them about making the trip as hunters, in order to help us put things back into perspective. When we got to the part about the dance, I took Ruby's hand and told our teammates that we were together.

Nora let out a delighted shriek that threatened to take the windows out of their frames and subjected us to another round of hugs before calming down enough for us to continue.

We didn't go into detail about our personal life, we simply described making our way to Vale, then Beacon and earning a tidy sum of lien on the way. At the end of it, Nora just gave us a playful smirk.

"Just how together are the two of you?" She asked us.

"We're intimate," I told her. Ruby nodded and rested her head on my shoulder.

Okay, another time out here. Some of you might think that I should have told her that it was none of her business. You'd be wrong. Some of you might think that we should have told her about the cave, the lumbering town, our encounter at my folks' house...everything. You'd also be wrong. You see, I made no secret of the fact that Ruby and I were together, as in had a very strong romantic attachment to each other. Anything beyond that wasn't the sort of thing that either of us felt comfortable telling just anybody.

Ren and Nora weren't just anybody.

It wasn't even a case of them being our closest friends. You see, they and us were teammates; that meant that we lived together, accomplished tasks together and even faced life-and-death situations together. People that close to you not only need to know, they deserve to know the nature of your relationships. No matter how professional we tried to be, the simple fact was that our being lovers changed the nature or our team dynamic...and the teammates had to be ready to adjust to that.

Okay? Time back in.

Nora was delighted at this latest piece of news and immediately sprang into action. While the room we had, now that we were in the senior wing, was slightly larger than the ones we had as first-years, they followed the same, basic layout: There were four single beds, and four lockers in a common room, plus a bathroom. Now that we were seniors, we rated four desks. We sort of followed along with Nora as she re-arranged the room, using the lockers to create two semi-private spaces with two beds, pushed together, in each space. They layout was actually more efficient, giving us some study space while allowing the two couples more privacy.

I know what you're thinking. Don't get ahead of me, I'll get to the exact nature of our interactions in due time.

So now that the room was rearranged, we formed the chairs in a circle to give Nora and Ren a chance to tell what they'd been up to. The told about the airship ride first to Beacon and then to a secret location...she wouldn't tell us where. Since then, the two had been living in a secluded cabin, taking in occasional trainers, as Nora struggled to come to grips with the power she now had.

That last comment started me to thinking, and the train of thought went into a pretty dark tunnel.

The headmasters insisted that Ren leave Nora to a life of isolation. Nora told them where to shove that idea. The headmasters told Nora that she should conduct herself with a certain dignity. Nora informed them what would happen if they tried to turn her into what they though she should be. Finally, our friends told the headmasters that they intended to return to civilization and only force would work to prevent it. Realizing how determined they were, Oscar consented to them attending Beacon.

Of course, the conversation then turned to the nature of what Nora now was. She informed us that she was still Nora, just with some additional advisers and powers thrown in. She then detailed just how she was interacting with the former Fall Maidens and how it affected her. I won't go into the details that she did, some of the things she said make me blush, these many years later.

Let's get something cleared up here, a lot of the misconceptions might have to do with the term 'Maiden'. One interpretation of this word is a young woman who has never indulged in certain activities. That wasn't Nora. Another interpretation could be a young woman who no longer indulges in those same activities. Again, that wasn't Nora. She had lived a hard, harsh life before Beacon and wasn't about to let anyone tell her what she could and couldn't do in that regard. She was with Ren and when the headmasters told her that the power might abandon her if she didn't give up certain aspects of their relationship, she informed them that the power was welcome to find a new hostess.

Okay, her actual words were a lot more blunt and graphic, but you get the idea.

This merging of her soul didn't take away her basic personality. I guess the previous Fall Maidens could give her advice and impart knowledge, but she was the one that decided what she was going to do. It was a far cry from the status of puppet that Ozpin's group had told Pyrrha might happen to her.

I was happy for my friend and I was happy that the power now resided in a tough, scrappy, friendly young woman with a powerful personality that wouldn't be cowed. However, this picked up the pace that my train of thought was running, and I didn't like the answers I was coming up with. At the time, I did something very stupid; I kept my mouth shut.

The rest of that day was pleasant: we caught the bullhead into town and picked up some things for the room before returning to Beacon and taking a stroll around the campus. The school strongly discouraged public displays of affection, so the four of us played the part of senior students who were very friendly with each other. That evening, we had our meal in the academy cafeteria, sitting rather awkwardly in the senior section and giving bemused glances to the kids sitting where Teams RWBY and JNPR used to.

Had we ever been so young?

There was no real awkwardness when we turned in for the night. No, the room did not become a synchronized love nest...we all had a little restraint and the layout Nora had come up with gave us all the privacy we really wanted. It was a little chilly in the room but the blankets were warm and I had a young lady who really liked to cuddle under them with me. My family, if you want to call it that, was together again.

I slept like a log.

The problem with waking up so well rested and alert was that I was able to recall what Nora told me about hosting the Fall Maiden's power, as well as what Qrow had said about Ozpin's decision to offer the role to Pyrrha. The first day of classes wasn't difficult for me, so I had the run-time, so to speak, to process things even more. You may very well have come up with the same conclusions I did. The unfortunate thing was that Ruby and I would be meeting with Qrow that night, so he was the one who was forced to bear the brunt of my conclusions.

Another problem was that a new professor had taught one of my classes that day; a class on effective speaking. It may sound funny, but I fully agree that communication is a vital skill for a hunter; we ran into many instances where being able to effectively inform a group of rightfully terrified civilians prevented disaster. We didn't always do it well, mind you, but we stumbled through. The problem was that the professor pointed out that you should have your facts ready before you opened your mouth, so I started putting together certain facts before our dinner with Qrow Branwen.

I can't remember the exact way that the evening went down, but I remember that Qrow had invited us to a place that looked nice...and that had a very private dining room in back. I didn't touch my food and that must have tipped him off. I wasn't a growing teenager at the time but I was still filling out my frame. A young man like me not eating meant trouble.

I've said before and might say again that I don't like Qrow Branwen. I've listed the reasons but another reason I admire him is that he faces his issues head on. That night, he realized pretty early that I was going to be an issue. So instead of trying to sidestep the issue, he looked me in the eye and asked me what was bothering me.

Actually, he asked me why I had a burr up my butt.

"Just thinking about Nora and how she's..." I let the statement hang.

"You can talk here, kid," he told me.

"Alright, it's good to see that Nora is still herself, considering some of the stories I heard about what accepting the power of the Fall Maiden could do." I managed to keep the snarl out of my voice.

"So, kid, you want to bring this up again?" Qrow sounded like he was feeling every one of his years three times over.

"It's interesting, considering the Pyrrha told me that it could completely overwhelm the hostess, leave her something other than what she was." Now I didn't bother trying to keep the snarl inside. "But Nora sure seems like Nora to me, isn't that fortunate?"

"Kid, we couldn't be sure," Qrow started.

"Don't lie to me!" I snapped at him. Both he and Ruby stared with wide eyes. "You knew better! I remember a conversation around a campfire when you said that Amber had been young and inexperienced. If the power dominated the hostess, how the Fall Maiden ever be inexperienced? For that matter, what would it matter if Cinder was the Fall Maiden? The power would have overwhelmed her and it wouldn't have mattered who the vessel was, would it?"

"Jaune, maybe you should stop," Ruby was looking between me and Qrow with wide eyes.

I could understand, even with his health affected by Tyrian's poison, he could have taken me with one hand tied behind his back. Ruby didn't want to have to fight her uncle to save my ass. On the other hand, another thing that I admired about Qrow was the fact that he wouldn't resort to violence until the other party did so.

"Look, I'm not saying that we make perfect decisions," he admitted. Somehow, that made it all the worse.

"But do you learn?" I snapped. "We talked to Nora, it seems that first, you told her that me and Ruby couldn't go along with her, and she agreed and left us in Vacuo. Then you tried to force her to leave Ren behind and she told you where you could stick that. After that, you tried telling her that her and Ren had to quit their relationship, she told you to get lost again. After that, you didn't let her have access to news or even scroll calls. She and Ren didn't know that we were trying to text or call them almost every day from the time we got a signal."

"Jaune, what are you getting at?" Ruby asked me.

"Your uncle is trying to manipulate Nora just like he manipulated Pyrrha!" I snarled back.

"Calm down, kid," now, there was some steel in Qrow's voice. "It was the headmasters' faction that decided it would be for the best..."

"A faction that you serve!" I shot back. "You guys thought it would be best if the Fall Maiden had no close friends, no personal attachments and no knowledge of the world other than what you want her to know! That way, whenever you need that power applied, she'll be ready to move on your command, without wondering if it's the right thing to do!"

"Jaune, what does this have to do with what happened to Pyrrha?" Ruby's voice was very small.

I should have noticed her distress and calmed down, but I was in full form.

"It means that Ozpin, Ironwood, Goodwitch and your dear uncle fed her a line to find out if she could be made into what they wanted her to be!" I snapped at my lover. "By telling her that line, telling her that she would just be a vessel for the power and wouldn't be herself any more, they were confirming that she'd be willing to submit to something worse, being completely dominated and controlled by their faction!"

"But what difference did it make?" Tears were starting to show in Ruby's eyes.

"The difference was that Pyrrha struggled with the decision for days," I hissed back, keeping my eyes locked with Qrow's. "She could only make the decision when the battle was already on! If they had been honest with her, she could have made that decision earlier. Then Cinder would have never found her and Amber, Ozpin wouldn't have had to go up against the Fall Maiden's power."

"All of that would have been avoided if you had done your job," Qrow growled back. "Yeah, I heard the story from Ozpin himself, speaking through Oscar. He set you in place to guard them. All you had to do was stop one arrow but instead, you were looking at your sweetheart."

"She was in pain and screaming for me!" I roared back, lurching to my feet.

"That's what Oz said," he yelled back at me, also climbing to his feet. "But he was willing to forgive you for it. It's been over four years! Aren't you ready to move on?"

"Not with you still doing the same crap!" I yelled at him. "You tried to isolate and use Nora as a tool! It was only when she threatened to walk away that you allowed her to come back to civilization, back to Beacon! What are you so terrified about, that she'll form a differing opinion?"

"We need to keep her safe!" Qrow yelled right back. "Do you think the assassins are all gone now that Cinder is dead? Salem's still out there somewhere, and she's probably already found her next pawn. Can you protect your friend? Can her lover? You couldn't protect Pyrrha under Beacon! How can anyone protect her in the middle of a crowd?"

"And you did a really great job protecting Amber!" I yelled back. "At least at Beacon, she has friends close by!"

"Hold it!" Ruby got in between us. "Aren't we all on the same side?"

"Maybe," I glared Qrow in the eyes. "But I'm beginning to wonder if _the side_ is really with us."

"Kid, we're not perfect," Qrow admitted again. "But we try. We go out there and sometimes screw up royally. Do you think you can do any better?"

"No," I admitted. "But I can at least let people know what they're doing, rather than herd them the way I want them to go."

The two of us stood there, trying to stare each other down. Ruby looked between the two of us before finally saying, "Jaune, maybe you should catch the early flight back to Beacon."

I did my best to keep the hurt and anger off of my face. After a moment, I just nodded, said something about overstaying my welcome, and stalked off. I was in no mood to arrive back early enough for Ren and Nora to question me about what happened. I was in no mood to spend time in the city or on the campus, so I walked back to Beacon.

Yes, there's a path that I learned after dozens of patrols. You go through the Commercial district and if you're a hunter, the guards will let you through a gate and into Forever Fall. The path leads through a corner of that red forest and to a cliff that leads to Beacon. The cliff has a cut in it, a very narrow trail that you can squeeze through. Once at the top, and if you're affiliated with Beacon, your scroll will let you in another gate.

I know it sounds silly that I wore my armor and carried my weapons with me to a dinner date...but huntsmen in Vale were expected to go armed. It was fortunate, since I was feeling a lot of dark emotions at the time. I seriously depleted the grimm population in Forever Fall, and it was very, very late, by the time I reached the academy. Ruby had already made it back to our room and everyone was asleep by the time I got there. I was in no mood to share the adjacent beds with Ruby but I had nowhere else to sleep, so I put on my pajamas and laid down on my side, as far away from her as I could, facing away from her. She did the same.

It's amazing how much room two people can put between them when they want to.

You'd think that the hardships that we'd been through would have meant that Ruby and I put this issue behind us quickly...and you'd be wrong. It was complex, so you have to understand what we were both feeling. On her side, I had just challenged and questioned the honor of her Uncle Qrow. She dearly loves that man and for good reason. He took her under his wing when she was first starting her combat training, and he took a clumsy, awkward girl and helped her turn into a force of nature. Not only that, he was the one she could kid with and joke around. Her father is a great man, make no mistake, but Qrow was sometimes more of a brother than an uncle to her.

The other issue, the one I didn't realize at the time, was she was still nervous about me having lingering feelings about Pyrrha. She knew that her mother, Summer, was her father's second love. Had Raven not left him, he would have never gotten together with Summer. Many people who knew both of them commented on how much Ruby reminded them of her mother and she felt...guilty...about getting together with me after Pyrrha died.

Never mind that it was close to four years after Pyrrha was killed that it happened.

I was completely over any lingering romantic yearnings for Pyrrha. I missed her at the time, and I still do, but I missed the kindly, capable and all around wonderful person that turned me from an idiotic slacker into an idiotic young man pointed in the right direction. What burns me up to no end, and still does to this day, is how needless her death was. I wasn't just making up bile to throw at Qrow that night at the restaurant; I still firmly believe that if the headmasters weren't so determined to make sure that the next Fall Maiden would be under their complete control, Pyrrha wouldn't have died at the top of Beacon Tower.

By then, I didn't care if she and I wound up together or not.

So that's the first thing that had me mad at Ruby; that she just couldn't see that her uncle was part of the group that through their own insecurities, doomed Pyrrha. The second was that she would throw away the years we had spent on the road to support him over me. I'll admit that I handled the situation poorly, that I should have kept my head and _asked_ about the whole situation rather than challenged him. The dust itself knows that I've done plenty of stupid things myself. Call it the impulsiveness of youth.

Still, it hurt when she dismissed me like that.

You might expect that our experiences on the road helped us deal with the situation. They didn't. The road had taught us to be stubborn as mules, so neither one of us wanted to be the first to admit that we were in the wrong. Sometimes, pride is a horrible thing. We refused to speak to each other, beyond the bare necessity, for two weeks.

It didn't help that Nora and Ren wanted to resume their...physical...relationship. You know the old college tradition of the sock on the door? Well, we were all adults so they just asked us to find someplace else to be a few nights. Of course, neither of us would admit to them that our relationship was in serious trouble. For some reason, not talking to each other was one thing but letting others know would mean that we had failed.

It was after the second or third occasion that Ren and Nora asked for a private evening that we finally started to face up to our situation. I came back to the room after the 'allotted time' and went straight to bed, lying as far to my side as possible, my back to the rest of the bed. An hour or so later, Ruby showed up and mirrored my actions.

Not that either of us were sleeping very much.

"Jaune?" Her whispered voice nearly made me jump out of my skin.

"Yeah," I answered.

"I...I don't want to be like this any more," she told me.

My heart plunged into my stomach. This was it, the friendship, comradeship and romance we had forged over the last four years was officially over. How could it have been so fragile? It took me a few minutes to muster my composure to reply.

"I understand," I managed to say. "We can talk to Ren and Nora tomorrow, see about putting the room back to the way it was." Now that it was over, I was able to address it more directly. "I'm sorry it came to this. I was hoping..."

"No," she insisted, rolling onto her back. "I don't want this not talking and avoiding each other. We can't give up on us without at least trying!" She paused a moment. "Or do you want it to end?"

"No!" I insisted right back. My heart crawled out of my belly and started to slither to where it belonged. "I...I just don't know how to start to fix it."

"I think we need to know that we both want to, before we can," Ruby told me. "Do you want to fix it?"

"Yes!" I didn't even need to think.

"So do I," Ruby told me. "But avoiding each other isn't doing it."

"I've got an idea," I told her. "But it will have to wait until morning."

"Okay, I'll trust you on that," she told me.

I also rolled onto my back and tried to sleep. We didn't cuddle, we didn't even make contact with each other and we both slept fitfully, which was a lot better than we had been sleeping.

The next day, I asked Ren and Nora if Ruby and I could have some 'private time' in the room. They agreed to find something else to do that night.

No, we didn't indulge in makeup sex; we worked at making up. We talked to each other, about how we felt and about how our actions had both hurt us and hurt _**us**_. Our romantic relationship had been so defined by the road that we struggled when we didn't have clear goals and constant tasks in front of us. I don't know if I can describe this well, but even before we admitted our feelings for each other, we always interacted with a strong background of a common goal, whether that goal was adjusting to Beacon, reaching Haven, or saving Vacuo. We were older now, so classes at Beacon weren't as daunting to us as they used to be. Without the daunting task hovering over us, our relationship struggled to adapt to life without the need to be incredibly in sync with each other.

That simplifies the issue and doesn't take in other factors, but it was a major part of our problem. The other part was that we hadn't realized just how much a small offense from one of us could hurt the other so badly. Put bluntly, part of the problem was that we were so strongly in love with each other.

We didn't solve our issues by the time Ren and Nora returned that night, but we got a good start. That night, we slept side-by-side. No, we didn't cuddle but we enjoyed the warmth and the contact...and we actually _slept_. We also came to an agreement with Ren and Nora by which one night a week, each of couple would have the room to themselves for a few hours. To my surprise, we wound up enjoying the nights that Ren and Nora had the room almost as much as the nights we did. Now, when we let them have the room, we actually went out on dates.

I know it sounds odd, but we had jumped from 'romantic interest' to 'lovers' in a very short time. We hadn't taken the time to really get to know each others' likes, dislikes and those little things that irritate you for no reason. That was part of the problem with our blowup over my argument with Qrow. On the nights that Ren and Nora had the room, we would spend the evening either going out for a nice dinner, studying at the library, taking in the City of Vale, or some combination. You know, typical dating behavior.

The second 'our night', we did some homework, watched a movie and just talked. It was enjoyable. I tried for the same thing on the third 'our night' and while it started out that way, it didn't work out the way I had planned. We chilled out in our little space, on our beds while we watched an adventure show on the screen. At some point, the chilling turned into cuddling, then to kissing, then to making out and then...

Well, an hour or so later, my bed was drenched with our sweat, she was laying on top of me and we were both trying to catch our breath. I remember pulling a sheet up to cover us while I said something about having learned that the makeup kind really is the best. I remember her laughing and telling me that we should get into another argument, so that we could make up again next week. We tucked ourselves into her bed and slept well and warm.

Except for my shins. I know it isn't possible, but I swear that Ruby's feet were always ten degrees colder than room temperature. Her favorite method of addressing this issue at night seemed to be to put them on my lower legs. We've been together for many years now and over all this time, her feet have only gotten colder.

To this day, I don't mind being her appliance for dealing with cold feet and a cold butt.

The damage that our argument had done to our relationship was now fixed, and we were stronger for it. The courses we were now taking had more to do with the non-fighting aspects of being a hunter; items like respecting the locals, dealing with military and police forces, making and keeping a budget, as well as respect for other hunters. In short, we were learning how to become more than effective fighters, we were learning to become heroes.

The semester passed in a blur; we were busier than we had been as younger students, but we had learned much more about dealing with life so we were able to handle the increased burdens and responsibilities much better. We were also thinking of practical applications for what we were learning. It was late in the semester when, as a practical exercise to one of our classes, we priced homes on Patch and realized that we could afford to purchase one on our budget. It was while congratulating ourselves on our earning capability and spending discipline that we suddenly realized something.

We _wanted_ to purchase a home of our own.

You heard me correctly; _we_ wanted to purchase a home of _our_ own. It was a serious moment, one in which we finally realized something that we had both actually known for some time. It prompted me to ask her a question; one which a tough, experienced huntress answered with tears in her eyes, even though the answer was positive.

I'm sure you can guess what the question was.

Just because we wanted to marry didn't mean we were quite ready to. We finished the spring semester; with very high grades I'd like to add, and started to look on the mission boards for gainful employment. We took on several jobs as a four hunter team, and distinguished ourselves as well as earning some solid lien. Then, Headmaster Oscar let us know that one of his agents had located Salem.

We had a new mission.

I explained before how Oscar and Qrow liked to have teams move slowly into and area that was in danger of coming under attack. This was different; this was a strike against a known enemy. Oscar suspected that Salem wouldn't stay put and allow the full might of all four kingdoms to be brought against her, so he moved with what he could assemble quickly and with a little bit of secrecy. General Ironwood formed a strike force while Headmaster Oscar dedicated airships and strike teams to accompany the attack. We joined up with Team CVFY to represent Beacon and Vale and we were off, to the far southeast of Anima.

We assembled outside of the volcanic wasteland, in which the agents had located Salem's stronghold. There, we assembled our forces. Weiss had come with the Atlesian Military, along with Cole and Neon. Brawnz, Nolan and May, from Team BRNZ, showed up to represent Shade while the agents who had located Salem, Sun and Scarlet, represented Haven. We made plans and prepared to move in.

Salem's stronghold was carved inside a dormant...recently dormant, volcano. Because of this, the Atleasian ships would only be able to do so much. Don't get me wrong, they contributed a great deal; they swept the area around the mountain of grimm and established a perimeter to prevent any of Salem's people...or other things...from escaping. They also set up aid stations in case any of us were wounded. But the real fighting was performed by hunters, stalking through the hot, dark passages and chambers inside the mountain.

I won't go into the tiring details of that fight. It took days, searching and fighting. Sometimes we were in large, open caverns and sometimes we were in passages we could barely squeeze through. On the fourth day, we located Salem herself and it was a brutal slug-fest. At the time, we didn't know why she hadn't just fled; I'm sure she had plenty of secret tunnels that could have gotten her away from the mountain and the tortured landscape would have given her an excellent chance to slip by the Atlesian perimeter. Instead, she called all of her creatures and loyal people together and fought it out in her throne room.

I thought that we had lost and were all about to die. We were all down, with wounds of various seriousness but in the end, I think that Salem's great power and evil triggered something in Ruby. For the second time in her life, Ruby unleashed the power of her silver eyes. It didn't kill Salem, but it wiped out her grimm and stunned the queen long enough that Nora, with some charging from Nolan's staff, was able to finish her off. After that, the remaining members of the White Fang either surrendered or fled.

The mission wasn't over, even though Ruby and Nora were pretty much tapped out. Ren and I had to leave our unconscious partners at one of the aid stations while we returned to the stronghold, along with Weiss and Sun, to continue to search the place. It was a nervous business, as the mountain was subject to earthquakes ever since the big battle. Still, we finally found what Salem must have been guarding, the reason she didn't just slink away into the shadows.

Have you ever seen a seer? It's a jellyfish-like grimm that floats through the air. It doesn't have any physical attacks but it can really warp minds and manipulate aura. Well, we found a vast, hidden cavern that held a seer over thirty feet across. The feeling of pure hatred and...wrongness...that came out of the thing sent us staggering back. Weiss sheltered us the best she could with her glyphs while the other three of us hacked and pounded at the giant grimm. With each hit, the hate that boiled off the thing got worse until not even Weiss's glyphs could shelter us. We staggered out of the chamber, only to feel the mountain tremble worse than it had before.

We figured out what was happening and ran back out to the aid station. We loaded everyone up on the ships and pulled back as dust and gas billowed out of the mountain. Finally, half of the thing collapsed in on itself and a blast of ashes burst out. A sense of unease and oppression that we hadn't noticed before was suddenly gone. We knew two things: The giant seer was dead and the dormant volcano wasn't so dormant any more.

The combined force set down on Anima away from the wasteland and established a camp for the wounded to heal up. Ren and I stayed with Nora and Ruby. It took less than a day for Nora to recover enough to join the vigil around my comatose lover. A day later, Ruby opened those beautiful, silver eyes again.

I nearly collapsed with relief.

Over the next couple of days, the wounded recovered and Ruby gained strength. She insisted on moving into a large tent with Ren, Nora and myself, saying that she would rest better with the three of us. It turns out that Ren and Nora had also worked out the trick of combining two sleeping bags into one large one. No, we didn't turn the tent into a love den but we all rested better with the new sleeping arrangements.

The important thing that happened over the next couple of days was that representatives from the four kingdoms really started to talk. I don't know if the giant seer was able to project distrust, but the kingdoms seemed much more ready to cooperate after it was dead. General Ironwood agreed to send technicians, without any escort, to Beacon to get the tower back on line and the CCT system running again. After that, it was time to say goodbye to friends again, and it was getting harder.

We were all taking on greater responsibilities, so we couldn't just run off across the world like we used to. This meant that each meeting could turn into our last.

While we could have taken an airship all the way back to Vale, I asked Ruby if she would like to stop near the west coast of Anima. She wasn't happy with the suggestion until I explained why, then she was overjoyed with it. Four years earlier, we had stopped in this village and traded upgrades to my weapons and armor for the removal of a geist. The blacksmith was still there, with a few gray hairs on his head and in his beard. He was still as strong as a giant and he had only gotten more skillful as time had gone by. We couldn't think of anyone we would rather have forge what he made for us.

In the end, I had to force him to take our lien for his services. He wanted to do it for free.

Instead of tramping all the way back to Vale, we hitched rides whenever we could. While we took on a few missions, we made the trip in only a couple of weeks. As soon as we picked up a scroll signal, we finalized the deal to purchase a house on Patch. Realizing that her father's birthday was coming up, Ruby asked me to skip a visit to my parents, or Beacon, in order to get her home as soon as possible. I agreed, of course.

Something else happened during those couple of weeks of travel; we made some plans for the future. I was now twenty-two and Ruby was twenty. Time had a strange way of rushing by when we weren't paying attention, so we realized that if we were going to live full lives, we were going to have to make an effort to do so. It was summer and we decided to spend another year building up our lien and our reputations, then we were going to see about starting a family.

Now, we had to break the news to Yang and Taiyang and not get beaten to a pulp in the process.

We reached Patch on the day of Taiyang's birthday. We didn't even get a chance to stop by his house to drop off our packs, we went straight to his favorite pub to find him celebrating along with Yang, Qrow, Professor Port and Prof...err...Doctor Oobleck.

I managed to be civil towards Qrow and he returned the favor my way. Of course, he was drunk so that probably helped his disposition a great deal. I clasped wrists with Taiyang and withstood his friendly thump on my shoulder that could have probably knocked over a stout tree. Yang gave me a hug that only slightly strained my ribs and then I was having a very interesting talk with the two Beacon Faculty members, discussing how their lessons had helped us in the real world. I was having a nice conversation when Ruby informed me that she was tired from the trip and would like to call it a night. I found this a little odd, since I was still good to go and she usually had more energy than me.

Then I caught the look she gave me.

Taiyang waved us off, telling me to take the guest room while Ruby took her old bed in what used to be her and Yang's room. I'll admit that we made the trip in pretty good time, picking up the pace as we went.

Okay, I want you to understand something; ever since we became intimate, we never really had a place to ourselves while we made love. Sure, we had some nice rooms at inns, but we always knew that someone else was either on the other side of the wall, under the floor or over the ceiling...or maybe all three. We made love while camping, but that always meant keeping one ear out in case someone or something was approaching. We had my old room at my folks' but with my youngest sisters...same sort of thing. Even at Beacon, when we had the room to ourselves, not only were there people in the adjacent rooms, but we had to be mindful of the time, not wanting Nora and Ren to be embarrassed when they showed up.

Okay, I don't think Nora would have been embarrassed; she would have probably offered advice, asked for advice, or even challenged us to make it a competition, but you understand what I'm saying.

Anyway, we were faced with the prospect of an empty house. (Even Zwei was at the pub...sort of a designated driver even though everyone was on foot.) We had hours to ourselves to take our time, relax and just enjoy ourselves. We fixed some light snacks, took turns cleaning up, then retired to the guest room. The light was dimmed to the perfect level, we had romantic music playing from my scroll, the bed was soft and warm, so we took the opportunity to make slow, gentle love to each other.

Of course, we were so distracted that we didn't notice when Yang showed. In our defense, I'll say that she was trying to be quiet, thinking we were asleep. What we didn't realize was how much the slow, gentle approach could really kindle things. We reached the point where Ruby, completely not meaning to, activated her semblance.

Just so you know, by then, she had lifted me and carried me along with her several in combat, so I had experienced the slight disorientation and the time dilation. This was different. One moment, we were working towards her climax and the next, the room was spinning around us, the scent of rose petals filled my nose and were weren't just joined, we were merged. Something else; the human male, once he discharges, is not supposed to be capable of recharging and discharging again, three times, in short order.

He's not _supposed_ to be able to.

The entire episode left me dehydrated, disoriented, confused, exhausted and happy. Of course, it woke up Yang and she confronted Ruby. She must have approved, because she didn't come in and pound me into a pulp. Ruby was still full of energy, something that irritated me to no end, but she decided that we should use the sleeping arrangements Taiyang had come up with for the rest of the night.

The next morning, Ruby visited her mother's memorial before I was even up. I was still a little wobbly when I got downstairs. Taiyang and Yang were still asleep, so I put together breakfast as quietly as I could. Eventually, father and older daughter joined me, both hung over. Still, Yang kept snickering at me from across the table, so I knew that she must have learned more about our situation than I wanted her to. By mid-morning, re-hydration and aspirin had gone a long way towards restoring everyone's good humor. That's when Ruby told her father and sister that she had something she wanted to show them.

Although Ruby and I had never seen this house that we had purchased, we had reviewed every inch of it via scroll signals and a reputable general contractor had inspected every inch before we made the down payment. Taiyang must have had some suspicions about why Ruby wanted to show him the house, but he let her make her declaration at her own pace. The four of us (five, if you count Zwei) went through every room inside and every square foot outside before Ruby asked her father what the thought of it. He said that it seemed a nice place.

I don't need to describe how Zwei showed his approval of every tree on the property.

At that point, Ruby took my hand and informed him that she was happy he approved. She then told him that it was our place, that we were in the process of purchasing it and would be moving into it. For over a minute, he just looked at the two of us. Then, I told him that I had already asked Ruby to marry me and that she had said yes. Finally, I asked him to give us his blessing.

When he finally took a step in our direction, I was sure I was about to get clobbered but instead, he grabbed my wrist again and welcomed me into the family. After that, he cried while enfolding his daughter in a close hug. Not wanting me to feel left out, Yang embraced me and called me her brother.

Here's something about Taiyang Xiao Long, he never grasped the concept of 'physically impossible' or 'physically impractical'. As soon as he realized that I was going to marry his daughter, he herded the four of us back to his house and went through some of his old kitchenware and furnishings. Then he had me help him carry Ruby's old bed out of the girls' old room, all the way to our new home.

Let me reiterate, we carried a full-sized bed more than two kilometers, with Taiyang waving at the bemused neighbors the entire way. It had a profound effect on me. When we carried that bed up the stairs and set it in the master bedroom, realization struck me.

For the first time since leaving my parents' house at the age of seventeen, I was home.

I didn't have time to reflect on this very much at the time. Taiyang was determined to set up his daughter in a livable house. The two of us made several trips between the houses, carrying housewares from his storage shed while he chased Yang and Ruby into town to make several other purchases. He didn't care that Yang was actually a bruiser who was stronger than I was; we still had to walk into town and carry their purchases back to our home. Qrow, Port and Oobleck, still nursing hangovers, showed up during the proceedings. Qrow also grasped wrists with me; he might not like me but that didn't mean that he didn't approve of me as a match for his niece. Still overjoyed, Taiyang hauled the lot of us to a nice restaurant for a celebratory meal. While we were dining, he insisted that we take enough time to visit my parents and tell them, in person, before taking on any more missions. After the meal, it was getting late so he escorted the two of us to our new home and wished us well before leaving us.

For several minutes, we just stood there, inside this mostly empty house. It was only partially furnished, we had stocked it with barely enough food for breakfast the next morning and it was still unfamiliar, but it was _**home**_.

I'm sure you're wondering, so I might as well tell you. Yes, we christened our new bedroom that night and yes, the horizontal tornado made another appearance. But this time, we had a pitcher of water waiting for me when we were finished.

The road teaches you to adapt.

We spent another day on Patch before catching the ferry and making an overnight trip to my home town. We had warned my parents that we were on the way and they were not only expecting us, they were expecting us to have news for them when we got there. It was a little disappointing that they weren't caught by surprise, even though they were very happy with the development.

Time was passing; now only one of my sisters was living at home, a total of three were married and another two were engaged. I now had a niece and a nephew, as well as another one (flavor unknown at the time) on the way. More gray hairs had appeared on my parents' heads, making me kick myself for not visiting more often. We stayed two days with my parents, giving all of my sisters a chance to visit us, before catching the ferry to Vale.

Yes, we went to Vale, rather than return to Patch, because we still needed to earn lien. We had heard that some big jobs were in the works and we weren't disappointed; the Vale Council had decided to re-settle Mountain Glen, but they were going to be a great deal more serious about it this time. Vast funds and resources had been allocated and assembled. We arrived and signed up in time to be among the first hunters to go into the dead city and start the initial sweeps.

For two months, we performed almost daily patrols of the...not empty...streets and buildings, clearing out the grimm over and over. After the first few weeks, we thought that we'd never make a dent in the numbers but finally, the grimm activity started to wane. We were still encountering them on a regular basis when phase two of the re-occupation began; the construction of a city wall.

Building a massive structure can be a difficult job. It's not only time-consuming and hard, it can be dangerous, as well. Heavy loads suspended in the air, tired workers and a grueling schedule can all combine with the grimm presence to make things nerve-wracking. I swear that every time the workers suffered so much as a barked knuckle or a bruise, it drew grimm. I have to give the council credit; they put the hunters on a rotation so we wouldn't get exhausted. Still, it was a long and difficult job for everyone. Ren and Nora were off doing something related to her status as the Fall Maiden, so we didn't see them. Our daily texts...and occasional scroll conversations...made it clear that the two of them were sorry about missing out on this.

Time blurred by. The year we had earmarked to work before getting married came and went. While we were a little saddened by the delay in our lives, we understood that the mission takes as long as it will. Besides, not only were we making very good lien, we were accomplishing something; the establishment of a new city! During this time, we took leave twice and spent a few days in our home, making it more ours and adding touches to make ourselves more comfortable.

Finally, the day arrived in which the wall was complete. Many of the hunters were released, but we stayed on to conduct additional patrols not only outside the walls, but within the city, searching the ruins and the subways, making sure that everything was safe for the new settlers. With the end of the mission now in sight, we made our final preparations and scheduled our wedding.

Workmen cleared a quarter of the city and built new buildings. After that, the first settlers arrived. These early residents weren't hunters, but they were all armed and trained to use firearms. Vale maintained a military presence as they moved in and started their new lives. Imagine my surprise when one of the new settlers was my sister, Esperer, and her new husband.

Suddenly, the massive walls didn't seem all that thick and the powerful military presence didn't seem very strong.

Winter had come again when we accepted our final payments and turned down a generous offer for a permanent job and very inexpensive housing to stay in Mountain Glenn. It was tempting to live in this resurrected community and take our places as guardians. I was very tempted to put myself between danger and one of my sisters. However, we had already purchased our home on Patch and had solid job offers there. It was with regret that we took the subway that had once provided a grimm invasion route, back to Vale. From there, we caught the airship to Patch and returned to our house.

During the next week, I visited a tailor while Ruby visited a seamstress, although we didn't let each other see what they had made for us. Yang and Blake came back from Menagerie; Weiss came in from Atlas while Sun made the trip from Vacuo. When Nora and Ren appeared from wherever secret location they were staying, the party was complete. At the time I was a little concerned about Nora, her face had broadened out a little bit and she seemed to tire easily, even though she was in a very good mood...even for her.

Don't call me an idiot, I figured out later what this meant.

At the end of the week, all of us, along with Taiyang, Qrow, Port and Oobleck, boarded the ferry for the trip to my hometown. We had already arranged for lodging in a nice hotel, although my folks insisted that I stay this last night with them. We all celebrated that night, with Taiyang absolutely charming my parents.

The next morning, I put on the fine tuxedo that the tailor had made for me. My parents and sisters all embraced me, saying how handsome I was. I didn't really hear what they said and I didn't have much of an appetite. You would think that the road would have prepared me for this, but it hadn't. I was a bundle of nerves, about to do something I had never done before and that I would never do again. It was a good thing that dad drove me to the church.

Ren, Sun and I waited in a side room. I guess the years had changed Sun, he actually wore a tuxedo instead of just wearing the tie with his normal clothes. At the appropriate time, one of the pastor's assistants let us know it was time to go inside, where the pastor was waiting behind the altar. I was surprised at the number of people who had assembled. Of course my parents, seven sisters, and the handful of brothers in law filled a good piece of one side of the church. Weiss and Blake were sitting together on the other side. However, I hadn't expected to see Team CVFY, Winter Schnee and General Ironwood. Before I could reflect on this, the ceremony continued.

Fist Yang and then Nora walked down the aisle. With them in place, the music changed and I first saw Ruby in her wedding dress.

Taiyang Xiao Long had also dressed up for the occasion. He wore a handsome tuxedo as he escorted his younger daughter down the aisle. Ruby was stunning in a gleaming white, long dress. It was modest attire, but she looked so lovely in it. She had grown out her hair during our mission in Mountain Glenn, and if fell softly down past her shoulders, fading to red. Those glorious silver eyes, visible through her veil, shone at me as the two approached. Then, her father placed her hand on my arm and he had turned to sit, with Qrow, on the front pew on the bride's side of the church.

I don't remember much of the ceremony. The pastor had always been one for feeling and substance, rather than empty claims and hollow sayings. During it, I promised myself that no sacrifice would be too great, no effort too exhausting, to do right by this young woman who had, for some reason, agreed to join her life to mine.

We had altered the ceremony somewhat. It isn't a good idea for hunters to wear rings...Qrow Branwen's habits not being standard. It's too easy for such a ring to get caught on a weapon and tear off the finger. Instead, Ren handed me the item that the blacksmith from the village in Anima had made the previous Spring. I placed the gold chain around Ruby's neck, and the twin arcs of the Arc family gleamed in shining silver upon her breast. Ruby isn't very tall so I had to crouch down low when Nora handed her what the same blacksmith had made for her. I felt the chain slide around my neck and when I stood up, a reddish-rose, shaped from shining copper, rested on my chest.

Then it was time for me to kiss my bride.

You'd think that this was no big deal; after all, most of those present had already worked out that the two of us were intimate and everyone approved, so just a quick smooch and we'd be on our way, right?

Wrong.

It's one thing to kiss the woman you love when friends and family are gathered about. It's quite another thing when it is a required function of a ceremony. If you make it just a quick peck, people will realize that you're nervous about all of the attention. If you get too involved in it, the comments are going to fly. I went for a dignified, loving kiss followed by a gentle smile. Seriously, that's what I wanted to do. As soon as I tried to back away from her, Ruby threw her arms around my neck and latched her mouth onto mine.

I had forgotten that she had spent most of the morning with Nora and Yang.

Her two bridesmaids let loose a cheer that probably rattled the windows. Blake and Weiss, usually reserved and dignified, jumped up and shouted with an enthusiasm I hadn't heard since they had supported their team leader's claim that justice would be swift, painful and delicious. The gathered huntresses and huntsmen, never the most reserved people when not on a mission, voiced their approval as well.

It suddenly occurred to me that I was was trying to stop kissing a beautiful, passionate young woman, who wanted to kiss me and whom I had every right to kiss.

The cheers got even louder when I wrapped my arms around her waist and stood straight, pulling her off of her feet.

Once we had properly demonstrated our enthusiasm for the union, the two of us led the way out of the church and to the reception hall. I can remember hoping with all my heart that there wouldn't be a food fight, although I made sure to spot a serving platter's lid that would make a good shield and a spatula that would make a good, substitute sword. You can never be too careful.

I don't remember much of the meal, other than there was no food fight, but I remember the dance that followed it. In some ways, my family is very conventional and Taiyang didn't have a problem with it. The first song started to play and he led his younger daughter onto the floor. Shortly after they started, my mother tapped me on the shoulder and I led her out onto the floor, as well.

"I'm so proud of you," she whispered to me.

"I didn't exactly follow the path you wanted me to," I pointed out.

"That's what makes me proud," her eyes were very moist. "You did what you thought was right and now here you are; a career, a home and a wife."

"I had a lot of help getting here," I reminded her.

"And you gave a lot of help on the way," she told me. "Don't brag, but don't sell yourself short, either. Look after your wife, she's a godsend."

"I know, mom," I assured her.

"But remember, you're her godsend."

"I love you, mom," I actually choked up when I said it.

"And I love you," she wept. "Now, it's time for you to dance with your wife."

Mom took me by the hand and approached Ruby and Taiyang. Seeing us, Taiyang kissed his daughter on the forehead and put her hand in mine. Taiyang offered his hand to my mother, which she accepted. Not wanting to leave my father hanging, Yang quickly made her way to him and offered her hand, joining him on the dance floor.

I hoped that she wouldn't break him.

Gradually, other couples came onto the floor; Nora and Ren were out there very quickly, followed by my married sisters and their husbands. I managed to keep from laughing when I saw my three unmarried sisters, all of whom had boyfriends with them. All three young men were getting hard looks. Suddenly, Nora was standing next to us. She reached out and placed a hand on both of our heads. Her eyes flew wide and something like flame showed in them. A feeling of warmth flowed from her hand into me, leaving me feeling strong, loved and happy. Looking at Ruby, I could see that she had just had the same experience.

We had just received a blessing from the Fall Maiden.

And that, everyone, was the third significant dance of my life.

 _To be continued..._

* * *

 _A/N: Again, my thanks to Joe Stoppinghem for beta reading._


	4. Chapter 4

_A/N:_

 _I originally planned on a four chapter story, but this last one had a little too much material for me to present it in one sitting. There will be a fifth chapter._

* * *

I can see you're getting tired of listening to me, so it's only fair to warn you that I won't be telling you about another dance at this sitting. You might think that I had already covered the important dances in my life; the one where I managed to admit to Ruby that I was in love with her, the one where we declared to everyone around that we were a couple and the first dance as her husband. There's one more dance important enough to talk about but you'll all be asleep if I get you all the way to it without a break.

So now I was happily married. It was time for our happy ending, right? I'm sure you are expecting me to say that we moved into our house, turned it into a home, and raised a family while going on the occasional quick and clean adventure. I can say that it at least started out that way.

I won't go into details about our honeymoon, just that we did a lot of what you're supposed to do on a honeymoon. My folks, Taiyang and Yang pitched in and put us into a nice resort for a week. I don't want to complain, because they really were luxurious accommodations and the staff had heard about my wife, so we were treated even better than the high standards of that place required. It's just that being waited on and cared for to that degree wasn't something either of us were used to.

After that week, it was the beginning of our lives together. Ruby quickly became the commander of the Patch Island guard force while I took on a job as a teachers' assistant at Signal. My father-in-law wanted to make me a full professor but he was concerned that the council would think he was simply giving the job to his family. There's a wonderful thing about not being naturally good at something but achieving mastery through long, hard work; you become pretty good at teaching others how to do it. In other words, if you need to find your way through a treacherous swamp, who's the best person to guide you? Right; someone who's gone through the swamp.

Learning to be a hunter works the same way.

Ruby and Yang had grown up in a hunters' home, so they learned to fight at about the same time they learned to walk. On the other hand, I could remember every humiliating hit and defeat I had suffered while learning my craft. I had also been through three attempts to overthrow kingdoms, so I knew the cost of not training thoroughly. I'm not trying to blow my own horn here, I didn't plan to become a good trainer; I stumbled into it. It didn't take long for me to prove that I could take a room full of scared, overconfident or just plain out-of-place kids and teach them the basics about personal, armed combat.

Within a month I had become a full professor.

It might sound like this was a boring life after what we'd been through. It was and we didn't want anything other than boredom. We had had enough of the type of excitement that results in extreme pain or friends and family being killed. We had had enough of seeing complete strangers torn apart in front of their loved ones, driving home the lesson that nobody is a complete stranger to everyone. In short, we were newly married and wanted a nice, long healthy dose of this peace that we had worked so hard to achieve.

Unfortunately, there's an old saying; the best way to experience peace is to prepare for war. It proved damned accurate. The grimm moved on Mountain Glenn shortly after I became a professor.

The Patch Guard couldn't afford to loose Ruby. On the other hand, Taiyang offered to put in double time to teach the kids, freeing me up to go to the besieged city. I'll admit that I was actually eager to go; not because I wanted to fight but because my sister was there. I hate fighting, but I hate the idea of my loved ones being attacked even more. Within twenty four hours of getting the word of massing grimm, I was on a bullhead flying to Mountain Glenn.

It was a throw-together mission. The bullhead picked up several other hunters on the way, and we hammered together a rough team framework by the time we got to the city. We arrived over the city just as the grimm forced one of the gates. Our makeshift team dropped right in their path.

I'm sure anyone who has ever been on a sports team or in a military unit knows that this wasn't a good situation. A bullhead ride isn't enough time to form a cohesive team. About all we were able to do was check out each others' weapons and experience and hammer out a rough idea of how we wanted to deal with the threat. We had figured out that I had the best armor, the most aura and the best weapons for in-close fighting, so guess who got to be the point of the defense?

By the dust of creation, sometimes it really sucks to be me.

So we drop right in front of an oncoming horde of rampaging grimm. I step forward into the lead and almost immediately, I'm swarmed. I didn't have time to be a leader; I didn't have time to be a teammate. It was just slash and kick, shield-bash and dodge; parry and thrust. One of my teammates was armed with a set of kama, so he was dancing somewhere off to my right. Another one had a great-ax, and she was off to my left. Another had a shield and spear combination, and her job was to keep the kama-guy from getting flanked while the last of our impromptu team was armed with a rapier and a dagger. His job was to keep the ax lady from getting flanked. I apologize to anyone who was expecting a story about the best plan that experienced hunters could come up with and executed the way only seasoned fighters could. About all we had time to work out was how to stay out of each others' way.

Of course, we also hadn't had a chance to coordinate with the city's defense forces. Either the local commander had some experience, or at least a galloping case of common sense. Most of the defenders didn't have activated aura or skill with melee weapons. There was a small core of hunters backed by most of the citizens, who trained a couple of days each month with firearms. While the locals were capable marksmen, firing into a melee is a good way to kill friend and foe alike. The smart, or at least common sense move was to concentrate fire on the breach itself and the area immediately outside the wall. That's what the residents of Mountain Glenn did. The chaotic fighting in the city wasn't fun for us huntsmen, but it was a whole lot better than being hit by friendly fire and the massed fire at the breach thinned the number we had to face.

I was heaving like a bellows and my aura was seriously depleted by the time the initial rush of grimm had been broken. Some more hunters showed up near the breach, spelling those of us who were exhausted. While we caught our breath, the head of the Mountain Glenn defense force showed up at the breach.

You might think that I, with my considerable experience, took over the defense. You'd be wrong. This gal knew what she was doing and was considerably more familiar with the local situation. When you walk into a situation like that, you do what you can to integrate yourself into the forces, you don't try to take them over. The woman who was in charge was a few years older than me, didn't have much in the way of imagination but more than made up for it with attention to detail and thorough planing. During the lull, she figured out our skills and deployed us logically. Of course, that put me in the middle of the fighting again.

The next wave struck a few hours later, after we had a chance to catch our breath and replenish our aura somewhat. They hit a couple other points on the city wall at the same time, so looking back, it was obvious that someone or something was planning the attacks: Grim don't mass before an attack, they just charge. Grim don't think of tying down the defenders with multiple points of assault, they just attack. During the day, the grimm made a total of eight, concentrated attacks and more hunters arrived in a sporadic faction, to be shoe-horned into the battle as soon as they showed up. Imagine my surprise when Yang turned out to be one of the arrivals.

We had a long night with very little sleep and even less support. Mid-morning the next day found us all exhausted, hungry and just about to collapse when Team CVFY showed up, leading a battalion of Vale soldiers. That turned the tide. We had a day to rest and prepare as best we could before the hunters moved out of the city and swept the immediate area while an emergency work crew repaired and reinforced the gate. It was during this time that Yang let me know that she and Blake had opened a combat academy in Menagerie and that was why she was in the area; she was meeting with Headmaster Oscar to ease the process of graduating her students from her academy to his institution. That, and Ruby had sent her a message asking for her to show up at our home for some news. She delivered this last piece of information with a knowing grin.

I hate it when people know something about me that I don't.

I also heard from Ruby. It seemed that grimm had attacked Patch while were were fighting in Mountain Glenn. This drove home the fact that it was a coordinated assault; someone or something clearly hoped that most of Vale's defenders would rush to Mountain Glenn, weakening the defenses in other parts of the kingdom. This bothered me, as it meant that huntsmen and huntresses would have to go find and deal with whomever was behind the attacks. I also asked her why she wanted Yang to come home. Ruby just smiled and said I'd learn a little before everyone else did.

In all, we spent three more days before the gate was repaired and reinforced. The transportation systems were filled to capacity shuttling wounded people out of and supplies into the town, so I spent a couple of days with Esperer and her husband. Both had been on the walls, shooting at grimm, but both were uninjured. I was especially happy about the last one, as Esperer had gained a little extra weight...temporarily. Yet another niece or nephew was on the way and I didn't really care which flavor it would be...mom and dad loved their grandchildren, so I hoped they would wind up with a lot of them.

In due time, Yang and I caught the subway back to Vale and yes, she found a proper stop, using the brakes, to be a welcome change from the last time she took a train down that particular tunnel. From there, we caught the airship back to Patch. I was very relieved to see my wife safe and sound, as she was with me. Taiyang invited us all to his home for dinner that night...I think the man had a serious case of the empty nest. For some reason, Ruby was very relieved to find out that Yang was going to be staying for a couple more days.

Later that night, as we lay in bed and I was just starting to drift off, my wife informed me that I had successfully performed one of my duties as a husband. Of course, I was dumbfounded at first, but when she took my hand and put it on her stomach, even I figured it out. That's why she was so happy that Yang was going to be home for a few days; she wanted to tell her sister in person but she wanted to break the news to me, first.

After all, I _did_ help.

I was a first time father-to-be, so cut me some slack about my attitude. Suddenly, Ruby stopped being the tough and resourceful young woman I knew and became frail and vulnerable. Yes, it was all in my mind but I wasn't the only one. Qrow immediately refused to come within fifty feet of her while Yang, Taiyang and myself thought it was blasphemy if she tried to pick up anything weighing more than ten pounds. The very next morning, during a spring rainstorm, she told me she was leaving to tell her mother the good news and I wound up going with her. Taiyang, Yand and Qrow all decided to make the trip, as well.

Okay, we were all overreacting; sue us.

Yang left for Menagerie a couple of days after Ruby's announcement, and it was sad to see the sisters separate. They had been so close for so long that it didn't seem fair to see life separating them the way it had. Ruby's pregnancy really drove the point home; sometimes growing up means growing apart.

For every issue of sadness, there were several things to be happy about. Taiyang was going crazy, helping us prepare our home for the new arrival, Ruby was very happy that we were going forward with our lives and yes, I was looking forward to a little one in the house, as well. We had seen so much death, so much loss that creating a life, adding life to the world, would hopefully balance things out.

I won't go into details about any odd occurrences during her pregnancy...they happened and I'd like to leave them between me and Ruby...it's much less painful for me that way. I will say that one chilly, winter night while she was in the shower, she calmly called through the door that her water had just broke. I reacted by flapping my arms rapidly, flying out the window, around the house and back in the window. We were prepared; our bags were packed and a coworker had volunteered to drive us. Less than an hour later, she was in the Patch Hospital and twenty hours later, I found myself holding a baby girl with silver eyes.

To be honest, I don't know if I wanted my children to have the silver eyes or not. Sure, Ruby's had saved Beacon from Cinder and a dragon once, then saved us again in Salem's lair, but they carry a heavy legacy with them.

We had already selected names; we wanted to honor Pyrrha and we had decided that any sons would have the last name Arc and any daughters would have the last name Rose. Therefore, we had the honor of welcoming Peridot Rose into the world on that chilly, winters' evening. I called the grandparents and sent a text to Aunt Yang. Of course, Taiyang walked through the falling snow...wearing his cargo shorts...to see his granddaughter yet that night.

There's nothing like bringing a child to it to make your house really feel like a home. There's nothing like a newborn child to drive home the fact that sleep is a luxury. There's nothing like a surprise visit from your folks, mine decided to visit us for a week, to allow you to get just a little sleep. A couple of days after my parents left, Ren and Nora showed up for a few days. For those days, I really felt like my family was complete.

I know that there were certain things that Nora had to do as the Fall Maiden, even though I still don't know what they were. Our teammates didn't stay nearly as long as I wanted them to before they were off again, to parts unknown. Shortly after that, I got a dose of supermom Ruby. I am still amazed at her ability to lead her defense force against a pack of beowolves, oversee a training regimen, bake cookies and read bedtime stories, all in the same day. She was not only willing to do it, she thrived on it.

Unfortunately, shortly after Ren and Nora left, the wonderful break we had from the hunters' life came to an end. Peridot was only two months old when word came from Headmaster Oscar that odd things were taking place out in the Menagerie desert. It was tempting to sit this one out. We were older and had responsibilities; I was a professor, Ruby was commander of the Patch Island Guard. We had a newborn to raise, so couldn't someone else do it?

Qrow never recovered his stamina after Tyrian poisoned him. Taiyang was headmaster of Signal. Yang and Blake had adopted two kids and were running both an orphanage and a combat academy. Weiss was running the world's largest company and Sun was assisting her, making sure that some of her less than honest employees didn't exploit locals in Vacuo again. Team CVFY was tracking some rumors down in Southeast Sanus. Then, Oscar played his trump card, letting me know that Ren and Nora would be part of the search. That settled it, there was no way they were going into danger without at least one of us going along.

I took the job. Peridot wasn't weaned yet, so it only mad sense to keep Ruby close to her. Let's just say that biologically, she had certain attributes that I didn't.

I took a series of airships and water ships from Vale to the southern coast of Anima. There, I met up with Ren and Nora and we took another ship to Kuo Kuana. There were hard looks our way and several locals didn't seem to want to point us towards Blake and Yang's home, but we eventually found it. While Blake greeted us warmly, Yang competed with Nora to see who could be the superior smotherer when it came to reunions. We then met with Ghira Belladona, who confirmed Oscar's reports of disappearances near the edge of the wasteland, as well as strange activity out in the desert. We picked up a map showing known water sources and oasis, as well as desert gear. Yang decided to take Ruby's place on our team and four of us put our boots on the ground again.

Were we fortunate or unfortunate to be forced to search the wasteland for six weeks before we found what we were looking for? Maybe it was unlucky, because all of us had places we wanted to be. You already know about me, Yang had her family and her academy to return to and strangely, Ren and Nora wanted desperately to finish the mission and go back to wherever it was they called home.

I'm sure you've worked out the reason why by now.

But maybe it was lucky because by the time we really needed teamwork, we had forged ourselves into a team. Team Journey, or JNRY, wasn't a well-oiled operation like Team RNJR had been, but the six weeks we spent searching, including numerous clashes with bands of both grimm and men, hammered us into a something fairly close.

Maybe eight weeks would have been better.

Anyway, we eventually tracked a band of White Fang holdouts through some dusty hills to what I can only call a slot ravine. This cut in the ground was maybe two kilometers long, a half kilometer wide and roughly three hundred meters deep, with only one, narrow trail available to descend. A stream rose from the ground at the south end, flowed to the north and vanished back into the earth. While all was waste and ash up on the surface, the ravine floor was lush and green.

We spent another week observing what was happening in the ravine and determined that angry White Fang members were bringing supplies to a small group of people who lived in a tunnel near the north end of the ravine. Also during that week, we saw them take eight captives, kidnapped Menagerie citizens, into that same tunnel. None of the captives ever exited the opening.

Yeah, ominous, wasn't it?

At first we debated why White Fang members, even those unhappy with the current leadership, would be kidnapping fellow faunas. We came to the conclusion that they must have really hated any faunas that didn't want to promote violence. Then we spent close to another day trying to come up with a course of action. We debated and discarded the idea of trying for a diversion to draw whomever was in the cave out of it, but decided that we would only alert them. We debated and discarded the idea of simply trying to storm our way inside, but decided that we should at least attempt to catch them by surprise. We couldn't wait much longer, as our supplies were running low. Strangely, it was our supply situation that gave us our plan.

Let me say right now that I didn't like the plan; it involved cold-blooded murder. Sure, we justified our actions by saying that the people we were about to kill were dragging others to their fate, but I still didn't like it. What I hated the most about the plan was that none of us could come up with a better one.

We backtracked the route the supply parties took to the nearest water hole, some eight kilometers, and concealed ourselves as best we could. When six White Fang members showed up, leading four camels, we murdered them in cold blood. It would call it a battle, but it would be a lie. We caught them by surprise, five of them didn't have activated auras, the one that did was no match for either Yang, Ren or myself and we had the Fall Maiden on our side. It was about as much of a battle as four cats pouncing on six mice.

When you travel through the desert, you quickly learn to cover yourself up with loose clothing. I mean everything; face and hands, as well as the rest of you. The White Fang weren't idiots, so they were dressed the same as we were. I'm sure you guess what we did; we took the clothing from the dead. We got a little imaginative; since much of the clothing was bloodstained, we chased off one of the camels and played the part of a party that had been ambushed in the desert.

Sometimes a little bit of truth makes the deception better.

We also didn't know much about handling camels, so we looked clumsy and awkward...which might have supported an observer thinking we were injured. So, like you guessed, we stumbled our way to the ravine, arranging to arrive during the day when our faunas opponents wouldn't have the advantage of superior night vision. We acted a little, stopping where the party we had observed earlier stopped and slumping in feigned exhaustion and pain. Three people rushed out of the mouth of the tunnel to help us and we performed another act of cold blooded murder.

Folks, you have to understand that while we thought there were only a dozen people, tops, in the tunnel complex, we weren't sure. We also didn't know just how skilled our opponents were or what else was in the complex with them. Cold logic dictated that we had to eliminate, permanently, every opponent that we came across.

Sometimes doing the smart thing will haunt you for the rest of your days.

We didn't have time to feel sorry for ourselves. We had a momentary advantage of surprise and we couldn't squander it. I took the lead as we rushed the opening with no solid plan other than to follow the left hand wall and clear out whatever we found.

I'll jump ahead a little bit and tell you what was going on in that complex. One of Salem's bunch had set it up to raise and test new forms of grimm. You already know that grimm get bigger and stronger the longer they live, so whomever was in charge of that place had come up with the logical and sick idea to keep new grimm under wraps until they were large enough and strong enough to do some damage. The captives we had seen being hauled in? They were kept starving and in pain, a constant source of negative emotions to feed the grimm. In fact, the leader of the place would occasionally torture a prisoner to death in front of the others, in order to super-charge the grimm in the tunnels.

Now, back to the story. In addition to the three people we had just killed outside, it turns out that the place held one scientist and seven people who were a combination of guards and laborers. The guards were big and burly, but not skilled. They could torment helpless folks and carry heavy loads, but that was about it. We met four of these guards right inside the door and cut them down. Continuing down a tunnel, we took the left hand door and found ourselves in a barracks, where we cut down three more who were just climbing out of their beds.

Once past the barracks, we kicked in the door to what appeared to be an office...empty. Moving further down the tunnel we found a set of more luxurious quarters...also empty. Then it was a longer section of tunnel to a stout door. We busted through that and found the captives; chained to the walls and with a dozen grimm that I had never seen before tearing into them.

Arthropods are not supposed to be able to get very big; something about the way they breathe not working when they're scaled up. Of course, grimm don't follow these rules; just look at a deathstalker. Take a scorpion, remove the tail and pincers, give it forelegs like a mantis and scale it up to the size of a sheep and you can picture what was tearing into the captives.

I found out later that these grimm were based upon a critter called an amblypigid.

We aren't fairy tale heroes; we weren't able to save all of the captives but we managed to save most of them. The creatures were tough, they had armor thicker than a deathstalker's and the spiked forelegs were more difficult to deal with than pincers. Soon, the creatures were dissipating and we we were releasing and administering emergency first aid to several wounded captives. That's when I saw another stout door, opposite from the one we had entered, swinging the rest of the way shut.

I was more than upset at the time; I had murdered White Fang members in cold blood and then saw live people being served up to grimm. When the door swung shut, I was pretty sure that whomever had let the grimm loose on the captives was getting away. I made a rookie mistake and went through the door without waiting for the rest of my team.

I burst through the door and found myself in a vast, open cavern, dimly lit by lights around the perimeter. In the center, a female stood, looking at me. She had very pale skin with black markings. No, it wasn't Salem's latest incarnation, just someone who had been marked by her. She turned to flee, I charged in pursuit and the largest of these new grimm jumped on me from its hiding place above me.

This grimm was twice the size of a cow. Some sense warned me and I did a tuck and roll, barely avoiding being crushed. I slashed off one of it's legs, which really made it angry. It slashed with its claws and I ducked, taking a serious raking across the back. My aura and armor stopped most of it, but it still hurt. I rolled away and the woman I had been chasing shot at me with some form of pistol. I jumped over the shot but while I was in the air, the giant bug caught me. It was strong, pinning my sword-arm to my side while the spikes dug painfully into my flesh. Its other claw came down at me, but I managed to get my shield up and block it. Then, of course, it pulled me towards its maw. I kicked at the beast, trying to keep away from those grinding mouth-parts.

I missed with my kick and instead of hitting the carapace above its mouth, I sunk my leg into it's mouth almost to my knee. The mandibles closed down and went to work.

If you ever have the opportunity to have your leg reduced to pulp while it is still attached, I suggest you decline.

Politely.

I have no coherent memories of the next several days. I spent a lot of the time blacked out, most of the rest of it screaming in pain. I remember times when one of my teammates, or even a strange faunas, gave me water and tried to give me food. I was able to drink but not eat. Eventually, I gained my wits in a hospital in Kuo Kuana. Ren filled me in on what happened.

After my teammates eliminated both the giant grimm and the twisted scientist that had created it, they found themselves with six released captives, two of which were too injured to move, as well as me. They caught some luck; one of the uninjured captives was something of a desert trader who knew how to find his way to civilization and knew how to handle camels. He left with two of the beasts while everyone left behind did everything they could to keep the body count from going up. Ren, Nora and Yang aren't doctors, but they've had to help enough wounded people that they aren't helpless. The only thing they could do for me was amputate what was left of my lower leg, tie it off, and try to keep it from going septic. They must have done a decent job, because I was still alive, over a week later, when the airship Ghira Belladona had managed to scare up, guided by the trader, managed to find us.

Here's another example of how I'm no hero and how my life was no epic tale. Once the hero is in the hospital, he's supposed to show his determination to recover as quickly as possible, while the staff provides support, amazed at his sacrifice and his determination to overcome it. That's not how it worked for me.

First of all, the doctor and the medical staff were complete professionals. They didn't care who their patient was, their job was to fix me up. About half of the non-medical staff wondered why they were taking care of a ' _stinking human_ '. About every other day, one of my meals had a whole lot of salt in the food and once, my leg became infected because the housekeeping staff 'accidentally' replaced my sheets with those from another patient's bed, rather than laundered sheets.

For another thing, I was feeling lonely. A day after my fever broke for good and I regained my wits, Ren and Nora came to my bedside and told me that they had to go. They were apologetic, they were clearly upset about leaving me behind, but now that I was out of danger, they were determined to go. I tried to put on a brave face, but there were tears all around when they left my room.

Later, when I figured out why they had to leave, I didn't begrudge them one bit.

After a week at the hospital, I was released to the care of Yang and Blake. They didn't have a spare room, but they let me crash on their couch while I tried to heal up enough to make the trip home. They were good hostesses; they gave me what space they could while expecting me to help out to the best of my abilities. I cooked, cleaned and helped out occasionally at their academy. This is the best way, as it forced me to move on my prosthetic. However, I wasn't well.

I woke up with nightmares more nights than not and there were times I swore that my missing foot either hurt or itched. I constantly had a feeling that something was about to jump on me from above me. Also, whenever I was out of the academy or the house, there were hostile eyes on me. Faunas had suffered a lot at the hands of humans and a very active minority of them didn't like the idea that another human was living among them. It didn't matter that I had helped halt an operation that was kidnapping, torturing and killing faunas.

Menagerie's CCT tower wasn't on line yet, so I had to use written letters to correspond with Ruby. It could take two weeks for a letter to get to her...assuming that it managed to do so. Yang had written her while I was still delirious in the hospital and I did again, shortly after being released. We had no way of knowing if she had received either letter. I felt like a third wheel while staying with Blake and Yang, so after a month of recuperation, I said my farewells and booked passage to Anima.

I learned something on that little trip; we had just reached the time of the year that sailors and aircrew called the storm season. The ship I caught wound up being the last one travel to or from Menagerie for the next six weeks. Still, the seas were high which meant that I was green and feeding fish for most of the voyage. When I reached port, I found out that the airships that served that plied the skies over southern Anima were of Mistral manufacture...they weren't like the high-powered Atlesian ships that flew over the worst of the weather, they flew down in the weather. That meant that there were no airships flying in that location at the time.

With no other choice, I put my boots back on the road and started to march.

As I had in the past, I tried to find work on the road. My problem was that I hadn't fully gotten used to my prosthetic by then, so I limped a lot, especially after a long days' walk. This meant that I couldn't get the work I really wanted, escorting caravans. Nobody wanted to hire a limping huntsman to walk all day...and I can't say that I blamed them. I still managed to cover my expenses but I spent more time at inn's than I wanted to. I still had the nightmares and phantom pains, so I wasn't sleeping well until one evening I had a late meal and an inn. My choice of beverage was either water or the local beer, so I had a couple. That village's beer was a lot stronger than what I was used to. I woke up the next morning with a splitting headache but...I had actually slept through the night.

Yeah, things went that way.

No, I didn't immediately take to the bottle but I came pretty close. I was no idiot; I didn't drink on the job or on the road. I simply had a couple every night to keep the pain and the bad dreams away. Eventually, I realized that the local moonshine was stronger than beer, so I bought a flask and had a couple of pulls at night, right before bed. I woke up feeling like hell, but at least I slept. Then I learned that if I had my nightly pull in the evening, in the common room, I was better company for the locals. It wasn't long after that that I was on the road, between towns, and couldn't sleep. I made sure that I was safe before taking a couple of pulls to get some rest. It was several more days' journey to the next town and I emptied my flask before I got there. For the last two days of that part of the trip, I had the shakes at times and I didn't sleep at all.

When I got to the town, I refilled the flask and took a couple of pulls to stop the shaking before I looked for work. The job I took was pretty simple, eliminating a small pack of ursa that was roaming the area. It took me a couple of days and when I was finished, I had a couple more pulls before telling some stories in the common room, planning to move on the next day. A young lady seemed to enjoy my tales and was interested in hearing some more, in private. It seemed like a good idea so I invited her to my room. Halfway up the stairs, I realized what I was about to do.

I finally realized that I wasn't holding the flask; the flask was holding me.

I escorted my new friend back to the common room and apologized for the misunderstanding. After that, I tossed the flask and went back to my room, alone. I didn't sleep that night and the next morning I was sweating and shaking. I did the only think I knew how to do, I put my boots back on the road again.

It was a six day hike to the next town. I don't think I slept more than two hours during those days and it's surprising that nobody tried to kill me, mistaking me for a grimm. There was an airship at the town and I had the lien to book passage to Mistral. From there, I could tap into my saving and get home in a few more weeks.

But I realized I couldn't do that.

I wasn't the same man who had left home nearly a half-year before and the lost leg was the least of the changes. I was pale and shaking. I jumped at almost every sound and I couldn't sleep. If I had climbed on that airship, I would have been another burden for Ruby to deal with, once I got home. I needed to straighten myself out before I could go back to being a husband and father. Instead of taking the fast way home, I looked for work.

It shouldn't be surprising to learn that nobody was interested in hiring a huntsman that looked like a strong wind could put him on the ground. That was fine, I still had enough lien to resupply myself and put my boots back on the road. I wasn't in idiot, when I resupplied, I saw a couple of rough characters watching me close. The next morning, when I left town I watched my backtrail and sure enough, they were following me. I guess I looked really weak for a couple of wannabe bandits to think they could roll me for my possessions. I waited for them, they came on and we had ourselves a nice little brawl.

It was a nice brawl because I didn't have to kill anyone. After introducing them to the flat of Crocea Mors' blade several times, they were ready to take my suggestion to march back to town. I 'encouraged' them all the way back, turned them in to the local constable and was on my way again, feeling a lot better about myself.

The next town was ten days' march and by the time I got there, I was eating regularly again and had sweated the rotgut out of my system. I still had nightmares but I could at least sleep part way through the night and the very smell of my sweat wasn't threatening to cause innocent animals and people to flee anymore. I must have had a little color to me as well, because folks looked at me and gave me nods of respect, rather than disgust or pity. I went straight to the town square and discovered that a caravan was going to be leaving in two more days. I looked up the master and managed to sign on for part of the trip.

This was a twenty day, slow march that took us to a town with another working airship. Those twenty days, with responsibilities and people around me did wonders for me. What really did me some good was that one of the senior guards was a huntsman who had fought in the Battle of Vale. We talked, swapped stories and I found out that he had suffered from nightmares and the jumps after that one. According to him, he wound up visiting a doctor and the medical professional got him some help to put things behind him...at least a little bit. Those conversations helped me put things into perspective.

When my weapon or armor was damaged, I had no problem hiring a blacksmith to help me fix them. When my boots were damaged, I hired a cobbler. When my clothing was torn beyond my ability to stitch it back together, I went to a tailor. So why was I so reluctant to visit a professional when my own mind was acting up?

When we delivered the caravan to its destination, I said my farewells and booked passage on the airship. A few days after that, I was in Mistral and was able to send Ruby text messages via the CCT system. I then booked passage on a ship for vale. It wasn't fast, but a few weeks after that, I was in Vale and was able to actually talk to my wife via the scroll! Later that evening, I was on Patch.

It had been a little over a year since I left.

I'll admit that I was nervous when I approached my home. It had been so long, should I knock or just walk in. I decided that manners wouldn't hurt, so I knocked. The next thing I knew, Ruby was in the door with her eyes wide. Seconds later, she was in my arms again.

By the dust of creation, how had I lived without this?

Eventually, a small person demanded attention. How had Peridot gotten so big since I had been gone? She was actually walking and I missed it! Oh, how she looked like a miniature version of her mother! The big, silver eyes looking at me looked so familiar. Instead of black fading to red, her hair was a light brown that faded to blonde at the ends. She was beautiful!

I dropped to my knee in front of her.

"Peridot, I'm home!" I told her. "Did you miss me?"

"It's your father, Perry," Ruby encouraged her. "He's finally back! Aren't you happy to see him?"

She looked at me, clearly seeing a stranger. Those big, silver eyes scrunched up and she wailed in terror.

Welcome home, Jaune.

 _To be continued._

* * *

 _A/N: Thanks to Joe Stoppinghem, for beta reading._


	5. The Fourth Dance

_A/N: Spoiler alert. Some of the concepts in this tale are those I will be using in my other, current tale, To Find Your Way Home._

Just so you know, that was about the lowest I've ever been in my life. When my own daughter was terrified of me...well, let's say I'd rather have a grimm chew off my other leg than go through that again. I missed her first words and her first steps, because I had to lose a leg while protecting people who later scorned me. It was one of those moments that I really, _really_ questioned my choice of careers.

But there was nothing else to do but to try to muddle through things. The very next day, I contacted Taiyang and was happy to learn that the combat academies had a policy; jobs are automatically held for hunters on missions for headmasters. I also called our doctor and got a referral to a specialist in Vale. I wound up going to the specialist once a week and on my very first visit, he suggested several possible hobbies to keep me occupied. Since it was springtime, I thought I'd take a try at gardening. This all set up what I like to consider my real homecoming.

I want you to understand that I was trying to ease into my home life. Kids are adaptable and within a couple of days, Peridot wasn't afraid of me any more. She wasn't ready for me to be 'dayee' but it looked like we were going to go that way. I still wasn't sleeping all that well and it was taking time to get used to sharing my bed again. I was also a little nervous about re-establishing the physical relationship with my wife. It was an awkward time, but things were looking up when Ruby got called in to handle some discipline problems on a Saturday.

I fixed breakfast for my daughter and myself. Afterwards, I marked out where the garden was going to go in and set up a small fence, getting Peridot's rapt attention. I dug up the sod and hauled it away, also to my daughter's amusement. When I hauled in more dirt from the surrounding forest and started to spade up the plot, she found a stick and started to help me...sort of. I learned a valuable lesson; if you want to bond with an eighteen-month old, do it over dirt. Pretty soon, we were close friends.

At lunch time, I washed up a little, fixed myself a sandwich and some food for her. Since we were both very dirty, we ate on the back step. To a child of that age, eating anywhere other than the table is an adventure. In Peridot's eyes, this 'dayee' character was starting to be a fun guy to have around. After lunch, it was back to work in the garden. Needless to say, my daughter was more than ready for her afternoon nap. I made her a little bed under a tree where I could keep an eye on her, which she considered another adventure, and kept working.

Shortly after she woke up, she supervised me as I put a roast in the oven for dinner. After that, it was back to work in the new garden. We got the soil leveled, furrows dug and were planting when Ruby got home. Her expression was priceless. While she was overjoyed to see our daughter actually bonding with me, she wasn't very enthusiastic about how dirty I had let her get. As the sun sunk towards the west, Ruby informed us that we wouldn't be allowed in the house until she took the garden hose to us. Being chastised by Ruby was another bonding experience for me and Peridot.

Since I had allowed our daughter to get so dirty, I had the honor of giving her a bath before dinner. While Peridot wasn't speaking full sentences yet, dinner conversation was dominated by her showing off the new words she had heard that day: dirt, mud, seeds, worm and ouch. Okay, I was a little clumsy with the tools at times. After dinner, I thought I would be able to read Peridot her bedtime story but she had had too big of a day for that. She was asleep before we got her up from the dinner table. Instead of reading to her, I tucked her into bed and kissed her forehead before turning out the light. I was suddenly feeling much better about myself.

As soon as Ruby and I took care of the dinner dishes, she chased me in to the shower. Yes, I had put in a strenuous day and I needed it. I was also looking forward to a good night's sleep after the hard, peaceful work. I was about halfway finished with my shower when Ruby joined me.

Apparently, she had some tensions to work out and was finished waiting for me to make the first move.

Here's an important safety tip; while you probably already know that it can be awkward and potentially dangerous to try certain activities while in the shower; you might not know that the awkwardness and danger are multiplied when the male only has one foot. We somehow figured that out before injuries or damage occurred...but it was a close thing.

Later that night, Ruby and I were lying in bed, completely spent and with her head resting on my chest. She slid up my body, whispered that it was good to have me back; then drifted off to sleep. My sleeping wife's breath was gentle in my ear and my daughter, who now thought I was a great guy, was asleep in the next room.

I was finally, completely, back home.

The good stuff had started. Our day care provider was close to Signal and I worked more regular hours than Ruby, so the day almost always started with me giving Peridot a ride on my shoulders and dropping her off. After work, I would pick her up and give her a ride on my shoulders back home. It was actually disappointing on those days that she decided that she was a big kid and could walk. I loved having her talk to me on the walks into and back from town, even though I could only understand about a quarter of the words at first.

I would occasionally take her to work with me. I'm not saying that it was a good or a bad thing, but looking back on it, those trips in to work probably went a long way towards her decision to become a huntress. I guess it's only natural for children to want to follow their parents' legacies. But more about that later.

Between my family, the doctor and keeping busy, my nightmares dropped off to the point that they were very rare. I wasn't as jumpy anymore, which was a good thing; you wouldn't believe how much a school full of young teens and weapons can affect your nerves. Sure, the occasional grimm showed up on Patch, but they were rare, common, and easily eliminated.

Also, that garden was a huge help. It not only kept me busy and helped me bond with my daughter, but it did something for my mental recovery. I'm no philosopher or psychologist, but I think that there's something in a man's soul that makes him want to create things rather than destroy things. Working on that garden, seeing the plants grow and thrive under my care, satisfied something inside of me. It was a great way to put myself back into 'peaceful husband and father' mode whenever I had to take on a mission and draw Croeca Mors in earnest.

Yes, we had the occasional mission, but Ruby made it clear to Oscar that we now had a family and wouldn't accept long term searches and we insisted on full support throughout the mission. Six months after I got back, Ruby took a short mission to the outskirts of Vacuo and eliminated a grimm that looked like a giant spider. Three months after that, I led a team of four, newly graduated hunters on a mission to destroy another of the amblypigid grimm that had gotten into the Kingdom of Mistral. We killed the beast and while I was shaking after the fight, my nightmares went away for good.

I got back in time for Peridot's second birthday. Of course, Taiyang went completely overboard with the whole thing. He got the little girl completely cranked up on a cake and ice-cream fueled sugar-rush, then got her playing to the point that she burned it all off. She was fast asleep by the time we got her home. I remember tucking her into bed and going downstairs to the living room. It was then that Ruby brought up the subject of a second child. We talked it over and decided that it was time to grow our family.

In the meantime, life went on. The nice thing about having an actual home was that old friends knew where to find us. Ren and Nora found there way to our house about twice a year, but they could never stay very long. Weiss was a very hands-on owner of the Schnee Dust Company, so she traveled the world inspecting her holdings and managed to drop by whenever she passed through Vale. Yang and Blake also visited the four huntsmen academies every year, so we saw them whenever one of them visited Beacon. We were busy and happy on Patch.

Shortly before Peridot turned five, I made an emergency trip to Mountain Glenn, once again, and helped repel another grimm attack. This one didn't have the desperation that the last such mission had. The defenders were able to hold the grimm at the city walls while I led a band of hunters in a sweep through the surrounding lands. We found and eliminated another of the toadies who was serving Salem's latest incarnation. Unfortunately, we weren't able to get any information as to Salem's location. As soon as I got home, Ruby was pulled away to investigate grimm activity on Menagerie Island. She was gone for three months, missing Peridot's first day of school. When my wife got home, she was missing two fingers from her left hand.

Another of Salem's faction had produced a grimm that looked like a giant mantis. When it attacked Ruby, my wife got Crescent Rose up to block its claw, but that claw hit the weapon where she was holding it. Fortunately, she was with a strong team, including both Blake and Yang, who managed to finish the beast while it was distracted with her.

Ruby seemed abnormally subdued for several weeks when she got home and I assumed that it was because she was coming to terms with her injury, like I had done. You might not think that loosing two fingers would be that traumatic, not after what we'd been through. Somehow, it makes you feel incredibly violated, like someone or something simply decided to modify you, without your consent.

It turns out that Ruby had already dealt with those feelings. It was about a month later, after Peridot was asleep one night, that she told me we should see the doctor. I remember taking her injured hand and asking her if it still hurt. She shook her head and told me that it was nothing to do with our injuries. We had been trying for close to three years to have a second child, with no luck. Something had to be wrong.

We saw our doctor, who sent us to specialists in Vale. In the end, the specialists were stumped. Both of our...ahh...contributions to the effort, were viable. Our efforts were frequent enough that we should have been conceiving and Ruby was perfectly healthy to carry more children. They had no idea why we weren't welcoming a second child into the world. We wound up trying a couple of procedures, but nothing worked.

We found out why later...I'll get to it in due time.

Ruby proved to be a super-mom. To this day, it amazes me how she could lead the defense force into a skirmish against bandits, then read fairy-tales to Peridot the next night. How she could drill her charges hard, form them into a cohesive team, and still make dinner. She could dress down a poor-performing guardsman, using language that made a seasoned huntsman blush, and use that same mouth to kiss a skinned knee just two hours later.

Our inability to get another set of feet running around the house notwithstanding, we enjoyed our life. Peridot grew like a weed and I graduated to the role of "a piece of playground equipment'. Sure, we built her a swing, slide and even a small monkey bars in the back yard. What did she prefer to jump on and climb? Me.

I didn't mind one bit.

I remember running for kilometers behind her bicycle as she learned to ride, building a tree-house for her, and taking her fishing. Yes, I missed her first steps but I didn't miss her first fish! I remember homework and story times, school plays and athletic competitions. Peridot excelled at all forms of sports and was above-average in academics. The future was so wide open for her that it took my breath away. I remember the combination of fear and pride I felt when she applied to, and was accepted by, Signal Academy.

I guess it shouldn't have been a surprise. While Ruby and I took care to not mention the more gory aspects of our adventures around her, we made no secret that we were hunters and proud of the difference we made. Her grandfather, Taiyang was the same way and she loved the aging man. Most of our friends were hunters, as well and they doted on our daughter. She particularly liked Sun, as he would hang from his tail to her delight whenever he came to visit. What I'm trying to get at is that growing up surrounded with proud hunters probably steered her towards that career.

Even if Ruby and I didn't know if we should be upset or proud.

Her acceptance to Signal made me really start thinking about her future, with an instructor's eye. She was clearly going to be taller and broader than her mother, although probably not as quick. She looked like she was going to have a rangy build, opposed to her compact and petite mother. While her face and eyes came from her mother, she seemed to have inherited her build from the women on my side of the family. She allowed her hair to grow out, and it was a light brown with blonde highlights. Sort of a compromise between me and Ruby. Peridot was also more sociable than either her mother or I had been at her age, making friends much more easily. In this, she was almost as outgoing as Yang or Nora.

To this day, I wonder how I could have had any part in creating this delightful child.

One of the first steps to training new students at Signal is to teach them hand-to-hand fighting. From there, they are given some basic training in several weapons, in order to see if the student has and aptitude or, more importantly, an interest in a particular one. Trust me, interest will turn into aptitude much faster than aptitude will turn into interest. I'll admit that I paid more attention to Peridot than I did to the typical student. So did Taiyang. Although my father-in-law was now the headmaster, he was in the habit of spending a great deal of time with the new students, getting an idea of their capabilities.

To his mild annoyance, Peridot clearly wanted to master weapons. To my mild annoyance, she showed no interest in weapon-and-shield. To Ruby's mild annoyance, she showed no interest in the two-handed weapons. Instead, she showed both skill and interest in paired types. For the first year, she practiced with tonfa, kama, sai and nunchaku. She also tried twin blades and even the rapier and main gauche. Towards the end of the year, she settled on the twin hooks and went to work with the weapon master to forge her own set.

It quickly became apparent that she would turn into every bit the legend with the twin hooks that her mother was with the sniper scythe. She named one Whisper and the other Hiss and they became extensions of her own limbs. For the next three years, I had the honor of watching her grow, transforming from a stringy, all arms-and-legs child to a pretty, graceful and confident young woman. In her third year at Signal, I had the honor of awakening her Aura. I will never forget her eyes widening and the blushing pink glow that formed around her. I will also never forget struggling to remain standing. Aura takes energy to awaken and strong aura takes more. I've said before that I have a lot of aura and that's one thing I'm glad she inherited from me. She definitely had a bright future as a huntress, but she threw another curve my way; she discovered boys.

Okay, she had discovered them some time before. I'm an educator and had learned to spot the peek-and-giggle activities among the students. What I meant was that she had discovered them to the point where she was interested in them as...boys. Yes, at the age of sixteen she started to date and my blood pressure started to rise. It's not that I didn't trust her, it's a tradition when you're a father and your daughter starts to date. I have to admit that I felt a certain serenity due to the fact that she was perfectly capable of eviscerating any boy who got ideas that she wasn't fully on board with. That serenity was wiped out by the knowledge that she was a bold and confident girl, eager to try new experiences. What really drove me up the wall was that whenever she brought a boy over for us to meet, the young man in question was always polite and respectful, the kind of boy you approve of your daughter looking at in that regard.

Isn't it terrible when you can't find a valid reason to complain about your daughter's dating life?

The stress to my veins and arteries aside, Peridot thrived during her final year at Signal. It was increasingly obvious to Ruby and me that she intended on becoming a huntress. It was with a certain amount of trepidation that I greeted the headmasters when they came by on their annual visit that year, to test potential students. Peridot signed up to be tested and fought her assigned opponent, who had just finished his second year at Shade, to a standstill. I met the looks that Oscar, Ironwood and the other two headmasters gave me; it was clear that they would all send her offers to attend their academies.

Another excuse to keep her away from the life of a huntress was gone.

In the weeks that followed, she received the four offers, sat down with us and we had some long talks. While Ruby and I both wished she would do something safe, we also wanted her to do something she had both passion and talent for. When she told us that she was so proud of what we had done for the world that she wanted to follow our footsteps, we cried and puffed up with pride at the same time. Our little girl was no longer a little girl; she was a young woman getting ready to find her way in the world.

Where had the time gone?

After talking with us, she informed Headmaster Oscar that she gratefully accepted his invitation to attend Beacon Academy. While Ruby put on a brave face, I could tell that it hit her hard. I think that our inability to have more kids came back to the front of her mind, brought on by the impending empty nest. While it hit me, it didn't bother me nearly as much. I don't know, maybe it's part of the different mindset between a man and a women or maybe so much of my fathering instinct was taken care of by my job at Signal. Still, it was a day of both sadness and pride when we walked her to the airship port and saw her on her way to Beacon.

We followed Beacon instructions and didn't accompany her, or even travel as far as Vale with her. This was her time and having us there would only distract from the reality that Beacon seeks to impose upon its new students; that you are now responsible for yourself and your parents won't intervene. We were on pins and needles, waiting for the first week to finish so she could call us. When our scrolls rang that evening, we probably set world records for the fastest answers.

Yes, we knew that Qrow would have let us know if anything dire had happened. Don't belabor the obvious.

While it was clear that she was at least a little homesick, she was excited about her new team. She was the leader of her team, was partnered with a girl named Norris and their teammates were boys named Insur and Kuroli. They formed Team PINK. She spoke about adjusting to life with roommates, as three of the four had been only children, of the increased class load and greater competition. All too soon, we ran out of things to talk about and all three of us had tears in our eyes when the call came to an end.

Now, our house seemed so large and empty. I called my parents yet that night, and texted every one of my sisters.

After that, it was adapting to the new reality. We got regular calls and texts from our daughter, Ruby continued to drill and command the Island Guard and I continued to teach at Signal. The winter break came and we welcomed our daughter home, for a few, precious weeks, with open arms. We asked her about her teammates. It seems that Norris was from Atlas, Insur was one of Yang's and Blake's students from Menagerie and Kuroli was from someplace outside the kingdoms. He didn't speak much of his life, but was highly skilled and capable.

Yeah, we should have figured it out, but we didn't.

We were sad to see her leave again, but she seemed excited. There was no Vytal Festival that year, but Headmaster Oscar asked me to take a group of his students on a mission. No, I didn't take my daughter's team; I accepted a team of second year students and took them on a patrol outside of Mountain Glenn. During the patrol, we stumbled across another new form of grimm; this one looked like a giant centipede, about the mass of a large ursa.

To this day I wonder why the scientists who study arthropods seem so susceptible to our enemy's recruitment efforts.

Back to the story. The creature actually had one of the students in trouble, wrapping around the girl and digging its fangs and claws through her aura. A lifetime of using my blade allowed me to decapitate the thing without hitting her, then pulling her free before the flailing body could inflict further injury. As soon as it dissolved, I called in the finding to Mountain Glenn and the officials sent two more hunters to back us up. I kept the students with me while we searched the area and eventually found another small outpost where, once again, one of Salem's latest faction members was working with the new grimm form. We managed to take her alive but the lair also had four captives, two of whom didn't make it. The two who survived were traumatized and not terribly grateful.

This turned into a rough, but necessary lesson for the students.

With our mission completed, we caught a bullhead back to Beacon. Before releasing the youngsters, I borrowed a classroom and handed them some solid lessons. I pointed out that our greatest foe wasn't the grimm, but those people who willingly worked with the great enemy. We talked a little about why anyone would work to destroy humanity, so I told them about how Salem seemed to exploit old grudges and exaggerate previous conflicts to keep people divided.

That led into a discussion of what others owed us for our services, and the answer was nothing that wasn't specifically agreed to. This is still something hunters have trouble understanding; that civilians don't owe us gratitude or favors in return for our services. A case in point was the two survivors from the latest mission. I explained to them that sometimes you're just too late to save everyone and everything, and while it wasn't right for people to resent you for it, you were even more wrong to try to change their attitude.

The role of a huntsman or huntress is to give others the right to have their own opinion.

I finished my lecture by explaining the cost of being a hunter, and not just the price in pain. I showed them my prosthetic and explained how I lost the leg, the animosity I experienced in Menagerie and missing my daughter's first words and steps because of the mission. I told them about my close brush with alcoholism and the long road that pulled me clear of it. I told them of my wife missing our daughter's first day of school and first friend over for a sleepover. It was very shocking to two of the students, as I had taught them back at Signal some years previously and they had never seen this side of me.

I must have gotten my point across, because one of them asked me if I was trying to talk them out of becoming hunters. I told them no, the world needed more hunters but we needed hunters that entered the life with open eyes and realistic expectations. It was the hunters who somehow expected cheering crowds and vast gratitude that went rogue.

The four students were somber but thoughtful when I released them. I then reported to Oscar, told him what we had experienced and told him that I would be happy to accompany student hunters on missions, but that I would be giving them something similar to the lesson I had just taught at every opportunity. The old spirit in the young man's body agreed with me.

Just for the record, I've given that lecture to every band of students I've escorted on missions, ever since. I'm convinced that it must have done some good, as only a couple of those students ever went rogue. Many more found other occupations and I'm pretty sure that they were the type that may have gone rogue, themselves.

As soon as I got back to Patch, Ruby took a leave of absence from her job to escort a band of first-year students on a mission of their own. No, she didn't escort Team PINK either. It was hard, but we were determined to let Peridot forge her own future. Ruby wound up taking her team to a town between the kingdoms, where they shadowed a sheriff for a week. They had a couple of clashes, but nothing terrible, just enough to give the kids a taste of the long hours the road can demand.

We did our best to settle into a new routine, even though the house seemed empty with Peridot gone. The two of us continued to volunteer to take teams of student hunters out on missions, with me filling in for Ruby whenever she was the one away. We even got a dog, a Corgi that acted quite a bit like Zwei did. Before we knew it, the spring semester was over and Peridot returned.

I swear that she had grown a half-foot while she was gone. I guess that's the problem when you're the parent of an only child; whenever she's away for any length of time, she sort of goes back to being a child in your mind. It's shocking when you see her in person again and realize that she's not a kid anymore.

We made the most of that summer, going on a vacation to Anima and visiting my folks and as many of my sisters as we could. We knew that our time as a family was running out, that it wouldn't be very much longer before Peridot would move out, take up responsibilities and not be able to visit very often. In other words, I was going through what my parents had. While Perry acted much as she had before leaving, she spent an awful lot of time corresponding with her teammate, Kuroli. Ruby and I often exchanged looks when our daughter was doing so; knowing that life was moving on.

When it came time for Perry to return to Beacon, Dr. Oobleck asked Ruby and myself to come in for a visit. The years had taken their toll on the good doctor, he was only hyperactive as opposed to gas molecule hyperactive. He sat us down and explained some research that he had done on notes and other media that had been recovered years ago, back when we eliminated Salem's incarnation and the giant seer on Anima. While neither of us understood his exact research, the conclusions were chilling.

Somehow, that giant seer had manipulated aura worldwide, affecting the fertility of anyone with an active aura. It was a very rare huntsman who managed to father more than one child and an extremely rare huntress who managed to become pregnant more than once, if they were alive while the creature was. For proof, Oobleck pulled out the enrollment records for Beacon. Almost every legacy student, the child of a huntsman and/or huntress, was an only child.

We thought about it. While Taiyang seemed to have broken this effect, Blake, Pyrrha, Ren and Nora had all been children of hunters, and were all only children. We hadn't managed any children after Peridot, despite enlisting the help of medical professionals in our efforts. While Sun and Weiss had two children, they were twins and I recalled Sun saying something about having no luck with more. We trusted Dr. Oobleck to carefully check and re-check his research, so we were sure he was right.

We also understood the implications; Ruby and I had gotten into the hunters' life because ancestors had lived it. Perry had become one because of our legacy. For generations, the most reliable source of new hunters had been former hunters. It made sense from Salem's perspective, slowly choke out the bloodlines of the greatest of humanity's defenders. Had she simply made all of us infertile, we would have probably realized that something was up much sooner. Instead, she had been sneaky, subtle and clever.

For a long time, I sat there thinking that I had dodged a major bullet in my past. Had I let myself go in one of the towns we stopped in...I could have very well missed out on my family life. Had Ruby and I not taken certain precautions when we first got together and then later realized that we weren't ready to raise a child...

After the somber reflection came rage. The thought that Salem had invaded our bodies in such an insidious way, affecting us in such a fundamental manner. Next to me, Ruby's breath hissed out, clearly just as angry as I was.

"Doctor," she addressed our former teacher.

"Bartholomew," he corrected her. "Or even Bart. We're colleagues now."

"Bart," she nodded. "What about Peridot, or her classmates? Is this...curse...hereditary?"

"I do not think so," he answered, softly. "But I have no way of knowing for certain. The current class of third year students represent the oldest children conceived after the creature was killed. We have no choice but to wait for them to begin families of their own and observe how successful their efforts turn out."

He offered us a sly grin, "I was thinking of spiking the punch at the latest dance, in an effort to spur the process along a little, but I decided that a large number of parents would take offense at that."

"Good choice," I nodded.

Ruby and I left his office and returned home. We didn't talk much that evening, with both of us alternately seething and grieving at what Salem had done to us, without us even knowing.

"So it wasn't us doing something wrong," Ruby finally said. "Or any injuries. For a long time, I was wondering if the beatings I had taken over the years meant that I couldn't..." she began to sob.

"Salem did it to us," I agreed, putting an arm around her shoulders. We snuggled close to each other, comforting each other as best we could. "We couldn't have known."

Again, the house felt very empty.

"At least the trying was fun," I offered, in an effort to cheer both of us up a little. That earned me a snort from my wife.

"Yeah, it was fun," she admitted. "And it still is." She sighed, "I hope Perry can have as many as she wants."

Complaining about our situation didn't make it any better, so we didn't do it. Instead, we continued our lives, defending Patch and educating the young. Another semester went by at Beacon, after which Team PINK was one of those selected to represent the academy at the Vytal Tournament, held in Vacuo that year. We watched as our daughter's team first defeated a team from Atlas. In the doubles' round, Peridot and Kuroli defeated a twosome from Shade. Ruby and I exchanged a look during this bout, as it was clear to us that my daughter and her teammate were something more than teammates to each other.

After the doubles' round, Peridot defeated a fellow Beacon student, then defeated a Haven student before falling to a Vacuo, fourth year student. The cameras caught her teammates consoling her, with her accepting Kuroli's support most readily.

Somehow, the young man looked familiar, but I just couldn't put my finger on why.

There wasn't much to say about the next few years. Peridot's third year passed without incident and her team competed in the Vytal Tournament again during her fourth year. She made it to the championship round, falling to that year's champion in an epic match. Later that year, her team made the traditional, fourth year field trip. Their route took them on a circuitous route across the center of Sanus. We tracked them whenever we could pick up their scroll signals and it seemed that they visited mining town that Ruby and I had visited shortly after admitting our feelings for each other. They also visited the agricultural town where I had the first important dance of my life. Unfortunately, the lumbering town had collapsed by the time they went by. Salem might have been weakened and in hiding, but bandits and grimm were always a threat.

Team PINK returned to Beacon with lien in their pockets and recommendations on their scrolls. Peridot and Kuroli stopped at Patch and spent a few days with us. Ruby and I shared a look; the two of them interacted with each other so much like we had the first time we visited my parents...except they had already figured it out. We offered them the choice between staying in Perry's old room together, or having Kuroli stay in the guest room. They actually thought about it before taking separate rooms.

I'm pretty sure that they were intimate at that point, but it wasn't any of my business. I trusted Perry to make her own decisions in that regard. You might find my attitude a little strange for a father, but like Qrow said so many years ago, huntsmen and huntresses live faster lives than most. My daughter was already making split-second, life-or-death decisions. She was perfectly capable of making those sorts of decisions, as well.

The fourth year field trip was the last test before graduation. Of course, Ruby and I went to see the graduation ceremony. Another Beacon tradition is, at the graduate's request, allow a parent or other family member who is a graduate present them with their diploma. We talked it over and decided to have Ruby give her daughter that particular piece of paper. After the formal ceremony, our daughter and Kuroli asked to see us, in private. We were pretty sure what it was about, but we didn't know if we should be happy or sad about it.

It turns out we were only partly right in our prediction.

I remember going into the meeting room that our daughter and her boyfriend had arranged. Before we got the big announcement, we got an apology from Kuroli.

"Mrs. Rose and Mr. Arc," he offered us a slight bow. "I hate to admit, but I have lied to you and to your daughter about my parents. Well, perhaps I didn't lie, but I was keeping things a secret. Had their identities been known, there could have been complications."

I remember noting the shocked look on my daughter's face, learning that her...more than a friend...had kept information from her for four long years.

"Who are your parents?" I asked him. I'll admit that I had dark thoughts about Cardin Winchester, Emerald or, dust forbid, both.

Instead, a door opened and in walked Nora Valkarie and Lie Ren.

My mind was churning as I embraced both old friends. Suddenly, Nora's broadened face and diminished stamina at my wedding made sense. Suddenly, their desperation to get back home, even when I was in the hospital in Kuo Kuana made sense. While I was hurt that they didn't see fit to let us know that they had a child, I realized why they needed to keep it secret. If any of Salem's operatives were to learn that the Fall Maiden had a son, that son would become an immediate target.

Ruby and I had just started to recover from our shock, and Nora's hugs, when the children unleashed the last shock of the day on us. They were going to be hunters. They were going to spend a few years on the road, earning some lien and a reputation, then they intended to marry. At first I wanted to tell them that they were too young, that they didn't know what they were getting themselves into. Then I realized that they were actually older than I was when Ruby and I came to the same decision.

What choice did I have but to give them my blessing?

I could tell you about how their lives went after that, but the details aren't important. The road forged them into a single being, much like it did me and Ruby, much like it did Nora and Ren. They had arguments and made up, had bad times and good. They were lauded as heroes one week and sneered at for being incompetent the next. They occasionally took on additional partners but mostly worked as a duo. They crossed the continents of Anima and Sanus more than once, taking on missions for the headmasters, the Schnee Dust Company and for local townsfolk. At times, they slept in soft feather beds, and at times in the mud at the side of the road. They visited us and they visited his parents at times, but the road always called them back. After more than three years, they decided it was time to formalize their relationship and to move forward.

They were married in Mountain Glenn, where they had just purchased a home. I walked my daughter down the aisle and placed her hand in the hand of the young man who then pledged to care for her as she pledged to care for him.

Not that they needed to make the promise, they had been doing so for years.

Ruby cried a little and I'll admit to a little sniffling, myself. When it came time for Kuroli to kiss the bride, he tried for a dignified peck, but Perry would have none of it. She wrapped her arms around his neck and expressed the passion she had for him. Nora jumped to her feet and cheered, followed quickly by Ruby, Ren and myself. The newly married couple then led us to the reception hall, where I had the fourth significant dance of my life.

I led my daughter onto the dance floor and took her into my arms. We both wept a little, but the road had taught her that change is a part of life, just like it had taught me so many years ago. It was now time for her to leave the family that had raised her and to forge a new one with Kuroli. I remember telling her that she was beautiful and that I was proud of her. Both were true of course. I remember her telling me that she knew that her mother and I were nervous about the path she took. It wasn't until after I had assured her that that was part of the reason I was so proud that I realized I had just repeated the conversation I once had with my own mother. Then it was time. I kissed her forehead, told her I loved her and handed her off to her husband.

I then danced with Nora, while Ruby danced with Ren. I looked around the reception hall; most of my sisters had made it and Peridot had about a platoon worth of cousins in attendance. Weiss and Sun made it, as had Yang and Blake. Taiyang and my parents had also made the trip, although all three were showing their age. Before the dance was finished, Taiyang offered his hand to my mother and Yang offered hers to my father.

"Thank you," Nora told me, bringing my attention back to the woman who I considered closer than any of my sisters. "Thanks for raising such a wonderful girl to marry my son."

"She takes after Ruby, thank the dust," I told her. She snorted out a quick laugh. "But thanks for raising a responsible boy to pair up with Perry. They look good together."

"That they do," she put her head on my shoulder. "It looks like the road approved of the match. If you still want to be with someone after crossing continents on foot, you were meant to be."

We danced in silence for a short time before Nora's sense of humor made itself known again.

"Have you started hinting that you want grandchildren soon?" She asked me.

"That's strictly their choice," I protested. "I have no intention of pressuring them into it. Although it would be nice if Taiyang and my folks live long enough to see great-grandchildren."

"Did you tell the kids that?" She offered me a conspiratorial grin.

"Well, I might have discussed it with Ruby while the two of them could overhear me."

"That's my boy," she pulled my head down and gave me a quick peck on the cheek before handing me off to my wife.

The rest of the celebration passed in a bit of a blur. The important thing was that we sent the new couple off on their lives before taking a few days to reconnect with friends and family that we hadn't seen in far too long. All too soon, it was time for all of us to scatter to our own homes and lives, once again.

Yes, I've said repeatedly that the house seemed empty but I'll say it again. Now, it somehow sunk in that this wasn't her home anymore. Our primary function in life, if you want to call it that, was finished. However, we took solace in the fact that so many people still needed us. We also started to invite neighbors over for dinner, filling the emptiness with new friends. Life is change, after all, and it's also what you make of it.

Close to a year went by; I remember that Taiyang was over for dinner the night that our scrolls all rang, indicating a call from Peridot. It was then that we got the news that we'd been waiting for. When I asked my daughter if she knew if the baby would be a girl or boy, she gave me a huge smile and said that she wanted both to be a surprise. I was confused until she pointed out the obvious, she was having twins.

I won't go into details about the anticipation that led up to the event. All that I'll say is that because Ruby and I had plenty of vacation time saved up, we made plans to be there. As the due day got closer, we packed up our bags and made the trip to Mountain Glenn. Strangely enough, it was the first time that I made that trip that I wasn't expecting to fight once I got there.

A few days later we got the call that she was in labor, so we made the trip to the hospital. In the waiting room, we ran into Ren and Nora. We spent a couple of hours catching up, remembering lost friends and those who were still around, but who we hadn't seen for years. We eventually got hungry and it isn't a good idea, even after all this time, to let Nora get hungry. Ruby and Nora decided to head to the cafeteria for a quick bite. A storm was brewing, making my leg hurt, so I decided to stay and wait. Ren chose to stay with me. Lucky us, the babies came while our wives were gone and that brings me to the here and now.

I'm sitting in the hospital, my leg hurting but holding my new grandson in my arms. Since I had the honor of holding a newborn girl so many years ago, the nursing staff gave me the boy. Since Ren had held a newborn boy all those years ago, the staff gave him the girl. We look at each other, reflecting on the fact that we're finally, truly, brothers. Eventually, our wives will show up and wheedle the babies away from us and then we'll go into Perry's room and thank our kids but until then, we get to sit here and hold our grandchildren.

Little man, before your grandmother shows up and pouts you away from me, let me pass on the wishes I have for you.

I hope that you and your sister have more siblings.

I hope that you choose a path in life that isn't exactly what your parents want you to take, but that you'll be so good at it and love it so much that they'll be proud of you.

I hope that at some point, a lovely, wonderful young woman falls for you and you fail to realize it until it's too late. Then, you'll cherish the right one so much more.

I hope that the path you choose in life doesn't come naturally, I hope you have to struggle and work hard for it, so that you appreciate it.

I hope that you make friends and face adversity and hardship with them, so that the years only draw you closer.

I hope that you face down a bully, but are a big enough man to not take revenge.

I hope that you endure just enough hardship to let you realize how good the good times are. I hope you suffer just enough so that you can appreciate the joy. No, I don't want you to live a life that's all sunshine and rainbows, I want you to go through rough times so that the sunshine seems all the brighter and the rainbows so much prettier.

But most of all, here's hoping that someday, you can sit down next to a man that's closer to you than any brother could be, holding your grandchildren, feeling the aches and pains of a hard life and know, deep in your heart that if you had the choice, you'd follow the same path.

Welcome to the world, little man.

* * *

 _A/N:_

 _Thanks to everyone who followed this little jaunt through my imagination._

 _More thanks to Joe Stoppinghem, for his beta reading._


End file.
